We might have loved a little sooner had we known

While the narrator struggles to end his relationship with Gilberte, he passes up an opportunity to meet Mme Bontemps' niece, Albertine, who becomes a central figure through the rest of the novel.

 "There was a scene at home because I did not accompany my father to an official dinner at which the Bontemps were to be present with their niece Albertine, a young girl still hardly more than a child. So it is that the different periods of our lives overlap one another. We scornfully decline, because of one whom we love and who will some day be of so little account, to see another who is of no account today, whom we shall love tomorrow, whom we might perhaps, had we consented to see her now, have loved a little sooner and who would thus have put an end to our present suffering..."