No use! Not a bit of use! All the hair-dressing in the world could not make me look old, or even approximately middle-aged. The ugliest flannel blouse that was ever made, while it would certainly be hideously unbecoming, could not add one year, let alone ten, to my age.
It was a bitter blow. All that morning I went about pondering the desperate question of how to look old. Aunt Emmeline had prophesied that I should know soon enough, “with those beaked features,” but I wanted to know now, not in any permanent, disagreeable fashion, but as a kind of sleight-of-hand trick, by which I could be mature one day and the next in blooming youth. Elderly in London, young at Pastimes. A douce, unremarkable “body” in the basement flat, and in Surrey a lady of leisure, rings on her fingers and bells on her toes!
Aunt Eliza would have cried once more, “Oh, don’t be silly!” if I had confronted her with such a problem. I said, “Don’t be silly!” to myself many times over in the course of that day, but I persisted in being silly all the same. At the back of my mind lingered the conviction that if I went on thinking long enough a solution would come.
How could I manage to look old? I asked the question of myself every hour of the next few days. I asked it of everyone I met, and was fatuously assured that I demanded the impossible; at long last I asked it of old Bridget, whose sound common sense had come to my rescue times and again.
“Sure, my dear, your husband will manage that for you!” was Bridget’s instant solution.
“Not the husband I shall choose!” I replied with easy assurance.
A moment’s pause was devoted to the problematical Prince Charming whose mission it would be to keep me young, then I asked tentatively:—
“What shall I look like, Bridget, when I am old?”
Bridget folded her arms and regarded me with a critical stare.
“Your hair will turn grey, and them fine straight brows of yours will grow thin, or maybe fall out altogether, and leave you with none. An’ you’ll wear spectacles, and have lines round your eyes. But it’s neither the grey hairs nor the specs that spoils the looks. It’s not them that’s the worst!”