And yet I know that in her death, she has found the freedom she could not find in life. She is no longer confined to a room, a bed, and a body that no longer works.

He was aware that her unthinkable beauty was neither that of age nor of youth. That her eyes were the only things you thought of looking at, and that to be her was terrible, whereas to be with her was the only joy.

She was crude, but loyal. He began to understand her even better than before. A pity she was so old; it was too late to try to make a human being of her.

"He came to be very glad that he had known her, and that she had had a hand in breaking him in to life. He has known pretty women and clever ones since then, — but never one like her, as she was in her best days. Her eyes, when they laughed for a moment into one`s own, seemed to promise a wild delight that he has not found in life. "I know where it is," they seemed to say, "I could show you!

He foresaw that she would be very much more useful to him in the character of a free woman.

Her face was round and rosy, with a healthful downy softness, suggestive of a ripe peach. Her hair, partially silvered by age, was parted smoothly back from a high placed forehead, on which time had written no inscription, except peace on earth, good will to men, and beneath shone a large pair of clear, honest, loving brown eyes; you only needed to look straight into them, to feel that you saw to the bottom of a heart as good and true as ever throbbed in woman's bosom. So much has been said and sung of beautiful young girls, why doesn't somebody wake up to the beauty of old women?

He's a woman.
He's a grown woman
He's a <i>old</i> woman.

I saw her in a Broadway car,
The woman I might grow to be;
I felt my lover look at her
And then turn suddenly to me.

Her hair was dull and drew no light
And yet its color was as mine;
Her eyes were strangely like my eyes
Tho' love had never made them shine.

Her body was a thing grown thin,
Hungry for love that never came;
Her soul was frozen in the dark
Unwarmed forever by love's flame.

I felt my lover look at her
and then turn suddenly to me,–
His eyes were magic to defy
The woman I shall never be.

As always, he found her better-looking in the flesh than in the memory he had of her when not present.

Even a blind man could see she is beautiful.

At the small table, sitting very upright, was one of the ugliest old ladies he had ever seen. It was an ugliness of distinction - it fascinated rather than repelled.

If only — so he thought to himself later — Gerda's face had been a little less flawless in its beauty, the beauty of her body would have remained as maddening to his senses as it was at the beginning. But the more he had seen of her the more beautiful her face had grown; until it had now reached that magical level of loveliness which absorbs with a kind of absoluteness the whole aesthetic sense, paralysing the erotic sensibility.

He lay, often, looking at her sleeping face in the new light that fell in through the open walls of the strange house, and he stared at her skin and hair with his mouth open, transfixed by the quick stillness of her, struck dumb with the physical fact of her existence as though she was some careless star-thing that slept on quite unaware of its incandescent power; the casualness and ease with which she slept there amazed him; he couldn't believe that such beauty could survive without some superhumanly intense conscious effort.

She had not known the weight until she felt the freedom.