which I have not sufficient grounds for reaction. When we are by
ourselves, at meal times, my hands are sometimes questionable. From
day to day, and from month to month, I defer going to the dentist and
postpone the attention required. I am allowing my molars to get
jagged.

Marie never shows any jealousy, nor even suspicion about my personal
adventures. Her trust is almost excessive! She is not very
far-seeing, or else I am nothing very much to her, and I have a grudge
against her for this indifference.

And now I see around me women who are too young to love me. That most
positive of obstacles, the age difference, begins to separate me from
the amorous. And yet I am not surfeited with love, and I yearn towards
youth! Marthe, my little sister-in-law, said to me one day, "Now that
you're old----" That a child of fifteen years, so freshly dawned and
really new, can bring herself to pass this artless judgment on a man of
thirty-five--that is fate's first warning, the first sad day which
tells us at midsummer that winter will come.

One evening, as I entered the room, I indistinctly saw Marie, sitting
and musing by the window. As I came in she got up--it was Marthe! The
light from the sky, pale as a dawn, had blenched the young girl's
golden hair and turned the trace of a smile on her cheek into something
like a wrinkle. Cruelly, the play of the light showed her face faded
and her neck flabby; and because she had been yawning, even her eyes
were watery, and for some seconds the lids were sunk and reddened.

The resemblance of the two sisters tortured me. This little Marthe,
with her luxurious and appetizing color, her warm pink cheeks and moist