At the Opéra Ball, a boy had danced half the night with a partner whose
youthful tones were so delicious, whose tenderness was so attractive,
that he implored her a hundred times to unmask. "If I do, you'll get up
and go away," she gasped at last, fondling his hand. He vowed that it
was her temperament that fascinated him, and she took the mask off--and
he saw the sunken face of an old, old woman.
Horrified, he left her.
In the same season, another man supplicated to a girl for her love--a
girl with a face so beautiful that it made him forget the strangeness
of her voice, which was flat and feeble. And the girl, who looked no
more than nineteen, replied with exhaustion: "I outlived such emotions
long ago. To tell you the truth, the subject sounds to me ridiculous.
All I want to-day is peace and quiet."
Wearily she left him.
These two incidents, peculiar as they are, were the outcome of an
occurrence queerer still--an occurrence at the tragic epoch of a
woman's life when her glass says: "Stop fooling yourself. You've
crumpled to _that_!"
Madame de Val Fleury had begun to combat the advance of age the day
after she detected the first shadowy threat of crowsfeet, as she
turned her perfect neck before the mirror. Her triumph was a fleeting
one, and the later conquests were briefer yet. Scarcely had the enemy
been driven from the glorious eyes when it crept about the chiselled
nose and mouth; no sooner was its attack upon her face withheld than
it showed greyly in her hair. But she never abandoned the contest,
she fought with Time continuously. And although there were moods of
depression, as measures more and more drastic were required, custom
and vanity enabled her, year by year, decade by decade, to view her
reflection with complacence. She beheld it through a haze of illusion,
in applying the colour to her shrivelled cheeks. She did not note that
the chestnut transformation that had looked so natural on a counter
looked spurious on her head; did not see how piteously the perfect neck
had sagged.
But one May morning the mirror said: "Stop tooling yourself. You've
crumpled to _that!"_ and madame de Val Fleury sat and saw her face
withered as it was--and madame de Val Fleury wailed for her lost
loveliness as she had never wailed for her dead husband and son.
A dress that she was to wear for the first time, and that had cost five
thousand francs, lay on the bed. She did not glance towards it. She
leant her elbows on the toilet table and stared at the brutal glass.
And beyond the glass she viewed the ghost of her empire, scenes where
famous beauties had turned involuntarily at her entrance. It was
the women's homage, the reluctant admiration of her own sex that she
mourned for, as she brooded there. In her backward gaze she saw why, as
the years sped, she had squandered more and more on her modistes--saw
bitterly that she had struggled to prolong, by her clothes, the
fast-waning jealousy of her face.
And at Longchamp that day she knew herself to be only an old,
unattractive woman, magnificently attired.
Not more than a month after this, madame de Val Fleury had the
annoyance to lose a pendant sapphire that she was wearing. A reward,
not illiberal, was offered, and when she woke from her nap one
afternoon she was relieved to learn that the stone had been picked up
by a poor girl, who was waiting in the hall to see her.
"If she is clean, I will see her here," said madame de Val Fleury.
The young girl who entered, in a threadbare frock, had been dowered
with beauty so extraordinary that all the lady's pleasure at recovering
her jewel was swamped in envy. The eyes, the complexion, the exquisite
modelling of the features held her mute for an instant.