Neither did she raise her eyelids, nor did her lips
part again. It was as if she had already quitted the world amid the mute
agony of her defeat.
That evening Seraphine's manner was extremely strange. She reeked of
ether, for she drank ether now. When she heard of the two-fold
"accident," the death of Morange and that of Alexandre, which had brought
on Constance's cardiacal attack, she simply gave an insane grin, a kind
of involuntary snigger, and stammered: "Ah! that's funny."
Though she removed neither her hat nor her gloves, she installed herself
in an armchair, where she sat waiting, with her eyes wide open and
staring straight before her--those brown eyes flecked with gold, whose
living light was all that she had retained of her massacred beauty. At
sixty-two she looked like a centenarian; her bold, insolent face was
ravined, as it were, by her stormy life, and the glow of her sun-like
hair had been extinguished by a shower of ashes. And time went on,
midnight approached, and she was still there, near that death-bed of
which she seemed to be ignorant, in that quivering chamber where she
forgot herself, similar to a mere thing, apparently no longer even
knowing why she had been brought thither.
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