crocheting hook.
The process was over. The sleeper was awake and there he stood, his
delicate face yet pinched with sleep and his eyes heavy, but alive and
young, young Hilsenhoff with his soft yellow hair and mild blue eyes.
On the floor before him in an attitude of adoration, knelt the woman
who in the view of the law, was his wife, her eyes burned out no
longer, but aflash with youthful passion. But in her eyes alone was
there youth. Nothing of youthful archness and coquetry was there in
her gaze, only greed, the sickening fondness of an aging woman for a
young man. In a daze, he stared at her and heard her clumsy
compliments, her vulgar protestations of love, things which the ripe
beauty of her youth might have condoned, but now were nauseating. He
saw her heavy jowls and sensual lips, the thick nose and all the
revenges of time upon a once beautiful body that had clothed an ugly
soul. He looked at his own rusty clothing, stiff and hard and creased
in a thousand wrinkles, and into the mildewed nest where the mould
from the moisture of his own body grew thick and green and horrible.
He gazed at Dr. Moehrlein, the one-time Adonis of Bonn, and he
shuddered, and which of what he looked at, or whether all, made him do
so, he could not tell.

Old men like young women, but so do old women hanker after young men.
The life companion of Moehrlein embraced Hilsenhoff's knees. With
smirkings and grimacings and leers that started his shudders afresh,
she told him all. She confessed her crime and abased herself, but now
they would begin life again, and she croaked forth a string of
allurements from a throat that had known too many rich puddings. Oh,
who shall describe her transports! Never before had every fiber of her
being been so penetrated with joy! A young husband, oh, a young
husband! By as much as Moehrlein had once surpassed him, did
Hilsenhoff now surpass Moehrlein a hundred fold. And young, young,
young! She was like to fall on her face in her ecstasy. The discarded
and despised Moehrlein stood by and paid, if never before, the price
of his villainy. There is a contempt of man for man and a contempt of
woman for woman, but the contempt of woman for man----

One sleeps and is unconscious, but nonetheless by some subtle sense is
aware of the passage of time, and the thirty years that he had slept,
pressed upon young Hilsenhoff and his soul yearned to take up life
again. He looked at the companions of his youth, that yo