I was just reading Proust and came upon a little scene in which the protagonist, the narrator, enters the room of a girl he favors, Albertine. At long last he's gotten her alone. After some pleasantries, he leans in to kiss her, or, as he more pointedly describes, "flings" himself upon her to kiss her and she shouts, quite unexpectedly, "Stop it or I'll ring the bell." And she does. Of course this leads to pages of exhaustive discussion about Albertine's nature and what might have led her to do such a thing, her sense of virtue, her station in life. The thing that caught my attention, though, in the end, was the protagonist's own speculation about more immediate explanations. He says, "I came to wonder whether her violence might not have been due to some reason of vanity, a disagreeable odour, for instance, which she suspected of lingering about her person, and by which she was afraid that I might be repelled, or else of cowardice—if for instance she imagined, in her ignorance of the facts of love, that my state of nervous debility was due to something contagious, communicable to her in a kiss." hehe This is one of the things I love about Proust. He exposes all. There might be reasons of character and virtue for her behavior, but it might also simply be that she had farted and didn't know how else to conceal it. hehe