eing. I feasted my eyes on her beauty, I saw nobody except her in the
theater, and did not listen to the piece that was being performed on
the stage.

"Suddenly, however, I felt as if I had received a blow from a dagger in
my heart, and I had an insane hallucination. Lucy had moved, and her
pretty head was in profile, in the same attitude and with the same
lines as her mother. I do not know what shadow or what play of light
had hardened and altered the color of her delicate features, effacing
their ideal prettiness, but the more I looked at them both, at the one
who was young and the one who was old, the greater the distressing
resemblance became.

"I saw Lucy growing older and older, striving against those
accumulating years which bring wrinkles in the face, produce a double
chin and crow's-feet, and spoil the mouth. THEY ALMOST LOOKED LIKE
TWINS.

"I suffered so, that I thought I should go mad. Yet in spite of myself,
instead of shaking off this feeling and making my escape out of the
theater, far away into the noise and life of the boulevards, I
persisted in looking at the other, at the old one, in examining her, in
judging her, in dissecting her with my eyes. I got excited over her
flabby cheeks, over those ridiculous dimples, that were half filled up,
over that treble chin, that dyed hair, those lusterless eyes, and that
nose, which was a caricature of Lucy's beautiful, attractive little
nose.

"I had a prescience of the future. I loved her, and I should love her
more and more every day, that little sorceress who had so despotically
and so quickly conquered me. I should not allow any participation or
any intrigue from the day she gave herself to me, and once intimately
connected, who could tell whether, just as I was defending myself
against it most, the legitimate termination--marriage--might not come?

"Why not give one's name to a woman whom one loves, and whom one
trusts? The reason was that I should be tied to a disfigured, ugly
creature, with whom I should not venture to be seen in public. My
friends would leer at her with laughter in their eyes, and with pity in
their hearts for the man who was accompanying those remains.

"And so, as soon as the curtain had fallen, without saying good day or
good evening, I had myself driven to the Moulin Rouge."

* * * * *

"Well," Florise d'Anglet exclaimed, "I shall never take mamma to the
theater with me again, for the men are really