It was fortunate that I had not already yielded to the temptation to break with Albertine; the boring thought that I should have to see her again presently, when I went home, was a trifling matter compared with the anxiety that I should have felt if the separation had been permanent at this moment when I felt a doubt about her before she had had time to become immaterial to me. At the moment when I pictured her thus to myself waiting for me at home, like a beloved wife who found the time of waiting long, and had perhaps fallen asleep for a moment in her room, I was caressed by the passage of a tender phrase, homely and domestic, of the septet. Perhaps⁠—everything is so interwoven and superimposed in our inward life⁠—it had been inspired in Vinteuil by his daughter’s sleep⁠—his daughter, the cause today of all my troubles⁠—when it enveloped in its quiet, on peaceful evenings, the work of the composer, this phrase which calmed me so, by the same soft background of silence which pacifies certain of Schumann’s reveries, during which, even when “the Poet is speaking,” one can tell that “the child is asleep.” Asleep, awake, I should find her again this evening, when I chose to return home, Albertine, my little child.