When she was in bed she could not sleep; she would light a candle again and lie, wide-eyed, thinking how insomnia and grief hasten irremediably the horrible work of fleeting time.  She listened in the silence of the night to the ticking of the clock, which seemed to murmur, in its monotonous and regular tic-tac:  “It goes, it goes, it goes!” and her heart shrank with such suffering that, with the sheet gripped between her teeth, she groaned in despair.

Once, like everyone else, she had some notion of the passing years and of the changes they bring.  Like everyone else, she had said to herself every winter, every spring, and every summer, “I have changed very much since last year.”  But, always beautiful, with a changing beauty, she was never uneasy about it.  Now, however, suddenly, instead of admitting peacefully the slow march of the seasons, she had just discovered and understood the formidable flight of the minutes.  She had had a sudden revelation of the gliding of the hour, of that imperceptible race, maddening when we think of it—­of that infinite defile of little hurrying seconds, which nibble at the body and the life of men.

After these miserable nights, she had long periods of somnolence that made her more tranquil, in the warmth of her bed, when her maid had opened the curtains and lighted the morning fire.  She lay there tired, drowsy, neither awake nor asleep, in the torpor of thought which brings about the revival of that instinctive and providential hope which gives light and life to the hearts of men up to their last days.

Every morning now, as soon as she had risen from her bed, she felt moved by a powerful desire to pray to God, to obtain from Him a little relief and consolation.

She would kneel, then, before a large figure of Christ carved in oak, a gift from Olivier, a rare work he had discovered; and, with lips closed, but imploring with that voice of the soul with which we speak to ourselves, she lifted toward the Divine martyr a sorrowful supplication.  Distracted by the need of being heard and succored, naive in her distress, as are all faithful ones on their knees, she could not doubt that He heard her, that He was attentive to her request, and was perhaps touched at her grief.  She did not ask Him to do for her that which He never had done for anyone—­to leave her until death all her charm, her freshness and grace; she begged only a little repose, a little respite.  She must grow old, of course, just as she must die.  But why so soon?  Some women remain beautiful so long!  Could He not grant that she should be one of these?  How good He would be, He who had also suffered so much, if only He would let her keep for two or three years still the little charm she needed in order to be pleasing.

She did not say these things to Him, of course, but she sighed them forth, in the confused plaint of her being.

Then, having risen, she would sit before her toilet-table, and with a tension of thought as ardent as in her prayer, she would handle the powders, the pastes, the pencils, the puffs and brushes, which gave her once more a plaster-like beauty, fragile, lasting only for a day.