'Don't be afraid of them,' I said. 'You'll always be the most beautiful.'

'Oh, not any more,' she said. 'No, not any more!" She was looking at herself with an unfriendly eye, and suddenly, for the first time in a good many years, I, too, saw her with the eyes of a stranger. She looked tired, her cheeks had taken on a purplish tinge, and her chin was starting to sag; the two deep gashes at the sides of her mouth pointed up the strength of her features. There was a time when Paula's creamy skin, her velvety look, the black shock of her hair softened her beauty. Deprived of that banal charm, her face became strange; it was shaped too definitely to excuse the indecision of a curve, the faltering of a colour. Instead of artfully engraving itself, time had brutally marked that noble, baroque mask which still well deserved admiration, but which would have been more in place in a museum than a salon.