“My appetite is dreadful in these days,” she said; “age increases it; I have just had my chocolate, yet 327 here am I, eating like a school-girl.... I have a strange idea that I am exceedingly young,... that I am just beginning to live. That tired, thin, shabby girl you saw at La Trappe was certainly not I.... And long before that, before I knew you, there was another impersonal, half—awakened creature, who watched the world surging and receding around her, who grew tired even of violets and bonbons, tired of the companionship of the indifferent, hurt by the intimacy of the unfriendly; and I cannot believe that she was I.... Can you?”
“I can believe it; I once saw you then,” I said.
She looked up quickly. “Where?”
“In Paris.”
“When?”
“The day that they received the news from Mexico. You sat in your carriage before the gates of the war office.”
“I remember,” she said, staring at me. Then a slight shudder passed over her.
Presently she said: “Did you recognize me afterward at La Trappe?”
“Yes,... you had grown more beautiful.”
She colored and bent her head.