has attained to
a certain age.

A great poet has said:--

"When we are young, our mornings are triumphant."

Then we wake up with a cool skin, a bright eye, and glossy hair.

When one grows older one wakes up in a very different state. Dull eyes,
red, swollen cheeks, dry lips, the hair and beard all disarranged,
impart an old, fatigued, wornout look to the face.

The Baron opened his traveling dressing-case, and made himself as tidy
as he could, and then he waited.

The engine whistled and the train stopped, and his neighbor moved. No
doubt he was awake. They started off again, and then an oblique ray of
sun shone into the carriage just on to the sleeper, who moved again,
shook himself, and then calmly showed his face.

It was a young, fair, pretty, stout woman, and the Baron looked at her
in amazement. He did not know what to believe. He could really have
sworn that it was--his wife, but wonderfully changed for the better:
stouter--why she had grown as stout as he was--only it suited her much
better than it did him.

She looked at him quietly, did not seem to recognize him, and then
slowly laid aside her wraps. She had that calm assurance of a woman who
is sure of herself, the insolent audacity of a first awakening, knowing
and feeling that she was in her full beauty and freshness.

The Baron really lost his head. Was it his wife, or somebody else who
was as like her as any sister could be? As he had not seen her for six
years he might be mistaken.

She yawned, and he knew her by her gesture, and she turned and looked at
him again, calmly, indifferently, as if she scarcely saw him, and then
looked out at the country again.

He was upset and dreadfully perplexed, and waited, looking at her
sideways, steadfastly.

Yes; it was certainly his wife. How could he possibly have doubted?
There could certainly not be two noses like that, and a thousand
recollections flashed through him, slight details of her body, a
beauty-spot on one of her thighs, and another opposite to it on her
back. How often he had kissed them! He felt the old feeling of the
intoxication of love stealing over him, and he called to mind the sweet
odor of her skin, her smile when she put her arms on to his shoulders,
the soft intonations of her voice, all her graceful, coaxing ways.

But how she had changed and improved! It was she and yet not she. He
thought her riper, more developed, more of a woman, more seductive, more
desirable, ad