She held up her face, he kissed each cheek, and then sat down in a low chair.
"It was last evening that you decided on this excursion ?" she asked.
"Yes, last evening." "Will you return to dinner ?" "I do not know.

At any rate do not wait for me." He looked at her with stupefied curiosity.

This woman was his mother! All those features, seen daily from childhood, from the time when his eye could first distinguish things, that smile, that voice--so well known, so familiar--abruptly struck him as new, different from what they had always been to him hitherto.

He understood now that, loving her, he had never looked at her.

All the same it was very really she, and he knew every little detail of her face; still, it was the first time he clearly identified them all.