“Forever Young”

“The professor’s wife, who had her hand under his arm in the best nineteenth-century style, wore her hair perfectly lacquered in place as if it were made of shredded-plastic threads. Despite being seventy-five years old, she still showed, in her expression, the spirit of a girl of twenty. Everyone on the balcony noticed this incongruous youthfulness of mien; it was quite stunning—as though a young girl had been trapped in a septuagenarian’s body. Skylar looked at the woman more closely. The couple walked so slowly that he had enough time for detailed observation. While the woman’s eyes were bright and lively, her mouth sometimes wide-open in adolescent gape, the host realized that her time-oblivious look could not be attributed merely to her facial appearance; instead, it bubbled up from the fresh waters of her soul; the soul brought light to a face that ought, by nature, to have been dimmed by time and care and flooded it with the wonder of the little girl in a Swiss-muslin dress with lemon sash who had somehow managed to avoid being lost in the passage of time: a little girl who only faintly recognized the parched, notched, and liver-spotted face reflected by her dressing-table mirror.”