en so happy, alert, and healthy! She felt that her soul was
still fresh and bright, her heart still young, the ardor of a being
that is beginning to live, an insatiable appetite for happiness, more
voracious even than before, and a devouring desire to love.

And now, all good things, all things sweet, delicious and poetic, which
embellish life and make it enjoyable, were withdrawing from her, because
she was growing old! It was all finished! Yet she still found within
her the tenderness of the young girl and the passionate impulses of the
young woman. Nothing had grown old but her body, that miserable skin,
that stuff over the bones, fading little by little like the covering
of a piece of furniture. The curse of this decay had attached itself
to her, and had become almost a physical suffering. This fixed idea
had created a sensation of the epidermis, the sensation of growing old,
continuous and imperceptible, like that of cold or of heat. She really
believed that she felt an indescribable sort of itching, the slow march
of wrinkles upon her forehead, the weakening of the tissues of the
cheeks and throat, and the multiplication of those innumerable little
marks that wear out the tired skin. Like some one afflicted with
a consuming disease, whom a continual prurience induces to scratch
himself, the perception and terror of that abominable, swift and secret
work of time filled her soul with an irresistible need of verifying
it in her mirrors. They called her, drew her, forced her to come, with
fixed eyes, to see, to look again, to recognize incessantly, to touch
with her finger, as if to assure herself, the indelible mark of the
years. At first this was an intermittent thought, returning whenever she
saw the polished surface of the dreaded crystal, at home or abroad. She
paused in the street to gaze at herself in the shop-windows, hanging
as if by one hand to all the glass plates with which merchants ornament
their facades. It became a disease, an obsession. She carried in her
pocket a dainty little ivory powder-box, as large as a nut, the interior
of which contained a tiny mirror; and often, while walking, she held it
open in her hand and raised it to her eyes.

When she sat down to read or write in the tapestried drawing-room, her
mind, distracted for the time by a new occupation, would soon return
to its obsession. She struggled, tried to amuse herself, to have
other ideas, to continue her work. It was in vain; the pric