Then I stepped steadily to the mirror hanging on the wall, and looked at my own reflection.

A bitter pang shot through me.

The dealer's sight was good, he had said truly.

I was old! If twenty years of suffering had passed over my head, they could hardly have changed me more terribly.
My illness had thinned my face and marked it with deep lines of pain; my eyes had retreated far back into my head, while a certain wildness of expression in them bore witness to the terrors I had suffered in the vault, and to crown all, my hair was indeed perfectly white.

I understood now the alarm of the man who had sold me grapes on the highway that morning; my appearance was strange enough to startle any one.