poor child. However, I did my duty, my conscience is at rest.
If I suffer it is known only to God."

The doctor had drawn from his coat pocket a fine water-color paint
brush.

"Let me attend to it," he said, "I will put it all right."

She held out her right cheek, and he began by touching it lightly with
the brush here and there, as though he were putting little points of
paint on it. He did the same with the left cheek, then with the chin,
and the forehead, 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 u