A hidden gem

After long effort, I have reached roughly the midpoint of Chapter Two of Part Two of Cities of the Plain, which is vol. 4 of Proust's Remembrance of Things Past. Specifically, in my Vintage Books edition (which collects the seven novels into three books), I am on page 864, where I found the following passage (translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin):

I ought to have gone away that evening and never seen her again. I sensed there and then that in a love that is not shared--one might almost say in love, for there are people for whom there is no such thing as shared love--we can enjoy only that simulacrum of happiness which had been given to me at one of those unique moments in which a woman's good nature, or her caprice, or mere chance, respond [sic] to our desires, in perfect coincidence, with the same words, the same actions, as if we were really loved. The wiser course would have been to consider with curiosity, to appropriate with delight, that little particle of happiness failing which I should have died without ever suspecting what it could mean to hearts less difficult to please or more highly privileged; to pretend that it formed part of a vast and enduring happiness of which this fragment only was visible to me; and--lest the next day should give the lie to this fiction--not to attempt to ask for any fresh favour after this one, which had been due only to the artifice of an exceptional moment. I ought to have left Balbec, to have shut myself up in solitude, to have remained there in harmony with the last vibrations of the voice which I had contrived to render loving for an instant, and of which I should have asked nothing more than that it might never address another word to me; for fear lest, by an additional word which henceforth could not but be different, it might shatter with a discord the sensory silence in which, as though by the pressure of a pedal, there might long have survived in me the throbbing chord of happiness.