On the day that her daughter was married in far-away New Orleans, Margot stood motionless by her mirror, staring at her own reflection. The day seemed oddly overcast. Suddenly she burst into wild, shrill laughter, cheerless and tragic, her body shaking, her hands wrung together, turned away with an epithet, reversed the glass, and never looked into a mirror again. Something had passed across her face like a strange, ambiguous stain. A shadow had fallen upon her like an unexpected dusk, or the dimness under a passing cloud, and had overcast her beauty. Not time with his pinching seam, nor age with its ugliness, but a subtle and more peculiar change had come over Margot Lagoux. There is a half-light in the hour of an eclipse which casts a weird spell on the world, when the sun is but a narrow crescent at high noon and the earth grows oddly dim in an untimely dusk. Such a dusk was fallen upon Margot Lagoux. Sultry beauty such as hers has ever an early afternoon; but this was more than sultry beauty’s early afternoon. Not day, not darkness yet, but dusk went with her everywhere like twilight in the woods. The sun shone brightly everywhere along a sparkling world, but on Margot lay a shadow, strange and sinister. As unbleached muslin sallows to dingy isabella, as metal tarnishes from neglect, as white paper dulls in the sun, as the spot on bruised fruit turns brown, Margot Lagoux was changing; she was becoming tawny, swart, _bisblanc_ as the Creoles say. Her golden-ruddy cheeks had turned a morbid olive-brown as if a somber fountain were playing in her blood. There were many women at that day on whom fate laid dreadful hands: Louise Briaud, who was blinded by smallpox; Fanchette Bourie, whom God pitied with death; Helene Richemont, the leper; Floride Biez, Doucie Baramont, Francesca Villeponteaux, wrecked by disfiguring maladies. God give them peace! But on none was laid so ruthless, unrelenting, deliberate a hand as fell upon Rita Lagoux. She changed like a portrait whose shadows, painted in bitumen, have struck through and distempered the rest. Like a strange, nocturnal creature she seemed to absorb the gloom. Her glorious eyes grew jaundiced; her rose-brown lips grew dun; the delicate webs that joined her fingers grew yellow as bakers’ saffron. Malice laughed at her thickening lips. Weeks turned months, months years; swarthy she grew and ugly. She put aside beauty as a worn, bright garment, and took on grotesquery stark and medieval as a Chinese teak-wood carving. She became both grotesque and contorted, gross, misshapen, sullied and debased. The old enchantment was gone like a necromancer’s spell. The perfect gait had faltered down to a lurching trot, a hurrying waddle with an irregular, unsure motion, hesitating a moment, then hastening on with vague uncertainty. Her soft, sleepy laugh had grown violent, her melodious voice coarse; of her fair face there was nothing left, no, not remembrance even.