Being in an audience collected to hear an eminent clergyman last summer, I heard an astonished gasp behind me, as the orator arose:
"Why he has shaved off his beard! How like a round oily man of God he looks!"
"True," said another, "but fifteen years younger. He is getting along in years, you see, and wants to hide the fact."
The last speaker sat opposite to me at the hotel table that day, and in discussing the leader of the morning service, repeated the phrase that had jarred upon my ear.
"It is fatal to a clergyman's popularity and to a woman's hopes to be suspected of getting along in years."
I told the story of my bearded youth and asked:
"Where then is the safe ground? When is it altogether reputable for one to declare his real age?"
"Oh, anywhere from thirty to forty-five! Before and after that term life can hardly be said to be worth the living."
I smiled, as the rattler meant I should. But the words have stayed by me, the more persistently that observation bears me out in the suspicion that the merry speaker only uttered the thought of many others.
"The years of man's life are three-score-and-ten," says the Word of Him who made man and knew what was in man. The wearer of a body that, with tolerably good treatment ought to last for seventy years, must then, according to popular judgment, spend nearly half of that time in learning how to play his part in the world, barely a fifth in carrying out God's designs in and for him, and then remain for a quarter of a century a cumberer of the home and earth. Such waste of strength, time and accumulated capital would be cried out upon as wretched mismanagement were the scheme of human devising.