, is a screen that hides everything
that stirs the woman within. A flush tells nothing, it only heightens
the coloring so brilliant already; all the fires that burn within
can add little light to the flame of life in eyes which only seem the
brighter for the flash of a passing pain. Nothing is so discreet as a
young face, for nothing is less mobile; it has the serenity, the surface
smoothness, and the freshness of a lake. There is not character in
women's faces before the age of thirty. The painter discovers nothing
there but pink and white, and the smile and expression that repeat the
same thought in the same way--a thought of youth and love that goes no
further than youth and love. But the face of an old woman has expressed
all that lay in her nature; passion has carved lines on her features;
love and wifehood and motherhood, and extremes of joy and anguish,
having wrung them, and left their traces in a thousand wrinkles, all
of which speak a language of their own; then it is that a woman's face
becomes sublime in its horror, beautiful in its melancholy, grand in its
calm. If it is permissible to carry the strange metaphor still further,
it might be said that in the dried-up lake you can see the traces of
all the torrents that once poured into it and made it what it is. An old
face is nothing to the frivolous world; the frivolous world is shocked
by the sight of the destruction of such comeliness as it can understand;
a commonplace artist sees nothing there. An old face is the province of
the poets among poets of those who can recognize that something which
is called Beauty, apart from all the conventions underlying so many
superstitions in art and taste.

Though Mme. d'Aiglemont wore a fashionable bonnet, it was easy to see
that her once black hair had been bleached by cruel sorrows; yet her
good taste and the gracious acquired instincts of a woman of fashion
could be seen in the way she wore it, divided into two _bandeaux_,
following the outlines of a forehead that still retained some traces of
former dazzling beauty, worn and lined though it was. The contours
of her face, the regularity of her features, gave some idea, faint in
truth, of that beauty of which surely she had once been proud; but those
traces spoke still more plainly of the anguish which had laid it waste,
of sharp pain that had withered the temples, and made those hollows in
her cheeks, and empurpled the eyelids, and robbed them of their lashes,