Bond Street had taken care of her complexion, but the veins in her hand were blue, and art had no means of concealing a certain sharpness of features and the thin lines about the eyes, nameless suggestions of middle age.

Yet she was still a handsome woman.
She knew how to dress, and how to make the best of herself.

She had the foreigner's instinct for clothes, and her figure was still irreproachable.

She sat and looked with a sort of calculating interest at the man who for years had come as near touching her heart as any of his sex.

Curiously enough she knew that this new aspect in which he now presented himself, this incipient cowardice--the first-fruits of weakening nerves--did not and could not affect her feelings for him.
She saw him now almost for the first time with the mask dropped, no longer cold, cynical and calculating, but a man moved to his shallow depths by what might well seem to him, a dweller in the narrow ways of life, as a tragedy.