Your health good? No nerves? We might make a
deal, if you mean business. Trouble is, so many beautiful women think
beauty as an asset is worth more than it is; it makes 'em careless about
studying while they're young, and it can't last--"
I never heard the end of that sentence. I flew home and went straight to
my mirror. Sure enough, I fancied I saw a haggard look about the eyes--
My God! This gift of beauty doesn't confer immunity from fatigue,
accident, old age. This loveliness must fade and crack and wrinkle, these
full organ tones must shrivel to a shrill pipe; and I--I! shall one day be
a tottering old woman, bent, gray, hideous!
And all the little disfiguring hurts of life--they frighten me! I never
enter a train that I do not think, with a shudder, of derailment and
bleeding gashes and white scars; or cross a street without looking about
for the waving hoofs of runaway horses that shall beat me down, or for
some bicycle rider who might roll me over in a limp heap on the paving
stones.
Yesterday I saw a horrid creature; her face blotched with red by acid
stain or by a birth mark. Why does she not kill herself? Why didn't she
die before I saw her? I shall dream of her for months--of her and
Darmstetter, old and wrinkled as I shall be some day, and dead--with that
same awful look in my fixed eyes!
Ah, what a Nelly I have come to be! Is it possible that I once rode frisky
colts bareback and had no nerves! I mustn't have nerves! They make one
old.
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