"From that night on, Monk was never able again to see that woman as perhaps she really was, as she must have looked to many other people, as she had even looked to him the first moment that he saw her. He was never able thereafter to see her as a matronly figure of middle age, a creature with a warm and jolly little face, a wholesome and indomitable energy for every day, a shrewd, able, and immensely talented creature of action, able to hold her own in a man's world. These things he knew or found out about her later, but this picture of her, which was perhaps the one by which the world best knew her, was gone forever. She became the most beautiful woman that ever lived..."