Concerning Mrs Harold Piper at thirty-five, opinion was divided – women said she was still handsome; men said she was pretty no longer. And this was probably because the qualities in her beauty that women had feared and men had followed had vanished. Her eyes were still as large and as dark and sad, but the mystery had departed; their sadness was no longer eternal, only human, and she had developed a habit, when she was startled or annoyed, of twitching her brows together and blinking several times. Her mouth also had lost: the red had receded and the faint down-turning of its corners when she smiled, that had added to the sadness of the eyes and been vaguely mocking and beautiful, was quite gone. When she smiled now the corner of her lips turned up. Back in the days when she revelled in her own beauty Evylyn had enjoyed that smile of hers – she had accentuated it. When she stopped accentuating it, it faded out and the last of her mystery with it.
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If Evylyn’s beauty had hesitated in her early thirties in came to an abrupt decision just afterward and completely left her. A tentative outlay of wrinkles on her face suddenly deepened and flesh collected rapidly on her legs and hips and arms. Her mannerism of drawing her brows together had become an expression – it was habitual when she was reading or speaking and even while she slept. She was forty-six.F.Scott Fitzgerald The Cut-Glass Bowl Penguin 2011
