ead, and then exclaimed:

"See, there is nothing there now, nothing at all!"

She took up the mirror, gazed at her reflection with profound, eager
attention, with a strong mental effort to discover something, then she
sighed:

"No. It hardly shows at all. I am infinitely obliged to you."

The doctor had risen. He bowed to her, ushered me out and followed me,
and, as soon as he had locked the door, said:

"Here is the history of this unhappy woman."

Her name is Mme. Hermet. She was once very beautiful, a great coquette,
very much beloved and very much in-love with life.

She was one of those women who have nothing but their beauty and their
love of admiration to sustain, guide or comfort them in this life. The
constant anxiety to retain her freshness, the care of her complexion, of
her hands, her teeth, of every portion of body that was visible, occupied
all her time and all her attention.

She became a widow, with one son. The boy was brought up as are all
children of society beauties. She was, however, very fond of him.

He grew up, and she grew older. Whether she saw the fatal crisis
approaching, I cannot say. Did she, like so many others, gaze for hours
and hours at her skin, once so fine, so transparent and free from
blemish, now beginning to shrivel slightly, to be crossed with a thousand
little lines, as yet imperceptible, that will grow deeper day by day,
month by month? Did she also see slowly, but surely, increasing traces of
those long wrinkles on the forehead, those slender serpents that nothing
can check? Did she suffer the torture, the abominable torture of the
mirror, the little mirror with the silver handle which one cannot make up
one's mind to lay down on the table, but then throws down in disgust only
to take it up again in order to look more closely, and still more closely
at the hateful and insidious approaches of old age? Did she shut herself
up ten times, twenty times a day, leaving her friends chatting in the
drawing-room, and go up to her room where, under the protection of bolts
and bars, she would again contemplate the work of time on her ripe
beauty, now beginning to wither, and recognize with despair the gradual
progress of the process which no one else had as yet seemed to perceive,
but of which she, herself, was well aware. She knows where to seek the
most serious, the gravest traces of age. And the mirror, the little round
hand-glass in its carved silver frame, tells her horrible