Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II Malvina Daevid was one of those women to whom old age is very tardy in coming, and whose beauty, modified in each season of life, never leaves them. For this last she was indebted less to the features of her face than to the immense charm of her movements, her smile, her expression, her speech. She retained yet the same pale, golden hair which she had years earlier, which she arranged high above her low forehead, calling to mind the statues of Grecian women. In contrast with that hair, and her slightly faded but delicate complexion, shone, from under dark brows, large eyes, also dark, with a very mild, warm expression, now bright, now tempered by a deep inevitable cloud of pensiveness. In a robe covered with lace, in the glitter of a star of diamonds in the bright aureole of her hair, she greeted the numerous acquaintances who entered her box at the theatre, with the affability and freedom of a perfect society lady. She was even celebrated in that great city for the qualities which constitute so-called society personages, and which, in those who knew her past, roused a certain wonder. It was known to all that that past was very modest. Darvid in his youth, which was far less brilliant than his present, married a poor orphan, a teacher. But Malvina Darvid was of those women who need only a golden setting to sparkle like diamonds. She shone in the great world with a charm, an elegance, a power of speech which were the same as if she had been its own daughter. Shewas radiant with satisfaction, with serenity, often even with joyous animation, and only now and then did a slight wrinkle, with a barely discernible line furrowing her Grecian forehead, sink itself and cast on her face an expression of weariness, or the corners of her lips, still red and shapely, drop downward...