That most positive of obstacles, the age difference, begins to separate me from the amorous.

And yet I am not surfeited with love, and I yearn towards youth! Marthe, my little sister-in-law, said to me one day, "Now that you're old----" That a child of fifteen years, so freshly dawned and really new, can bring herself to pass this artless judgment on a man of thirty-five--that is fate's first warning, the first sad day which tells us at midsummer that winter will come.
One evening, as I entered the room, I indistinctly saw Marie, sitting and musing by the window.

As I came in she got up--it was Marthe! The light from the sky, pale as a dawn, had blenched the young girl's golden hair and turned the trace of a smile on her cheek into something like a wrinkle.

Cruelly, the play of the light showed her face faded and her neck flabby; and because she had been yawning, even her eyes were watery, and for some seconds the lids were sunk and reddened.
The resemblance of the two sisters tortured me.

This little Marthe, with her luxurious and appetizing color, her warm pink cheeks and moist lips; this plump adolescent whose short skirt shows her curving calves, is an affecting picture of what Marie was.