avity. Her face was handsome with its large
regular features; one noticed the abundant black hair under the hat, the
thick eyebrows, the brown and opaque skin, the teeth impeccably white,
and the firm, unyielding mouth and chin. Underneath the chin, half
muffling it, came a white muslin bow, soft, frail, feminate, an
enchanting disclaimer of that facial sternness and the masculinity of
that tailor-made dress, a signal at once provocative and wistful of the
woman. She had brains; they appeared in her keen dark eyes. Her judgment
was experienced and mature. She knew her world and its men and women.
She was not too soon shocked, not too severe in her verdicts, not the
victim of too many illusions. And yet, though everything about her
witnessed to a serene temperament and the continual appeasing of mild
desires, she dreamed sadly, like the girls in the archway, of an
existence more distinguished than her own; an existence brilliant and
tender, where dalliance and high endeavour, virtue and the flavour of
sin, eternal appetite and eternal satisfaction, were incredibly united.
Even now, on her fortieth birthday, she still believed in the
possibility of a conscious state of positive and continued happiness,
and regretted that she should have missed it.

The imminence and the arrival of this dire birthday, this day of wrath
on which the proudest woman will kneel to implacable destiny and beg a
reprieve, had induced the reveries natural to it--the self-searching,
the exchange of old fallacies for new, the dismayed glance forward, the
lingering look behind. Absorbed though she was in the control of the
sensitive steed, the field of her mind's eye seemed to be entirely
filled by an image of the woman of forty as imagined by herself at the
age of twenty. And she was that woman now! But she did not feel like
forty; at thirty she had not felt thirty; she could only accept the
almanac and the rules of arithmetic. The interminable years of her
marriage rolled back, and she was eighteen again, ingenuous and
trustful, convinced that her versatile husband was unique among his
sex. The fading of a short-lived and factitious passion, the descent of
the unique male to the ordinary level of males, the births of her three
girls and their rearing and training: all these things seemed as trifles
to her, mere excrescences and depressions in the vast tableland of her
monotonous and placid career. She had had no career. Her strength of
will, of cou