The Frontier by Maurice LeBlanc

"There! " she said, after a few minutes. "The storm is over."

She raised her beautiful face, now lit with a smile:

"No black on my eye-lashes, you see," she added, gaily. "No rouge on my lips. Take note, please. Nothing that comes off!"

This versatility of mood, the despair, which he had felt to be real, followed by a light-heartedness which he felt to be equally sincere; all this bewildered Philippe.

She began to laugh:

"Philippe! Philippe! You look as though you did not understand much about women. and even less about girls!"

She rose and went to the next room, which was her bedroom, as he saw by the white curtains and the arrangement of the furniture; and she returned with an album, in which she showed him, on the first page, the photograph of a child, crying:

"Look, Philippe. I haven't changed. At two years old, just as now, I used to have great big sorrows and eyes that flowed like taps."

He turned the pages of the album. There were portraits of Suzanne at all ages: Suzanne as a child, Suzanne as a little girl, Suzanne as a young girl; and each was more bewitching than the last.

At the bottom of one page, he read:

"_Suzanne, twenty._"

"Lord, how pretty you were! " he muttered, dazed by that image of beauty and gladness.

And he looked at Suzanne, in spite of himself.

"I have grown older," she said. "Three long years."

He shrugged his shoulders without replying, for, on the contrary, he thought her lovelier still; and he turned the pages. Two loose photographs slipped to the floor. She put out her hand to take them, but did not complete the movement.

"May I? " asked Philippe.

"Yes, certainly."

He was much astonished when he examined one of the portraits:

"This," he said, "makes you look older than you are. How funny! And why that old-fashioned dress? . That quaint way of doing your hair. It's you. and yet it's not you. Who is it?"

"Mamma," she said.