I am dreadfully afraid to say so, but there are no serving young ladies who are so cruel as the milliners' young ladies. They are of course not all perfectly beautiful, but their wonderful tresses are always built up in such an artful way that they never fail to nestle in the nooks and crevices of the most unearthly creations. But they always say "It just suits Madam," even when they cannot possibly reconcile it to their conscience!
One asks why do all the big shops employ, for the destruction of the public, those tall sylph-like creatures who float about like denizens of a higher sphere, in their wonderful black satins. These satin robes have such an air that the white pins which occasionally hold together a rip look only like an eccentric ornament. The divine lengths of those graceful figures!
They are a serious unbending race to whom all things are becoming. So when they trail up and down what may be termed the trial halls of fashion to show off to a short, stout customer a garment to which she mistakenly aspires, no wonder that, struck by a temporary insanity, she succumbs. She is convinced that her five feet by an equal breadth will look like a five-foot ten inches, which is, besides, so attenuated that it is a problem how the young person can dispose of anything even so ethereal as a penny bun. Why not be merciful and employ a dumpy lot for dumpy customers!
It is a terrible thing in these days that there is no growing old. No happy time comes when the tired features are at liberty to sink into comfortable wrinkles, and nobody cares. The supreme joy of taking one's well-earned rest saying, "Behold, I am old! Age also has its beauties and compensations." The trouble is that nobody really believes it to be a joy.
There is probably no parting so painful as the parting from the days of one's youth; even if the outside be ever so youthful there is a knell in one's heart that tolls to the burial. One of the surest signs of age is when one begins to think of the past. Youth dreams of the future, middle age lives in the present, but old age dreams of the past. But whoever acknowledges dreaming of the past now that old age is out of fashion!
Years and years ago, when our mothers were very young, there was a distinct fashion for elderly people; certain colours were sacred to them, certain fashions, certain fabrics and certain jewels. What young creature would have foolishly decked herself in either purple or yellow? Youth rejoicing in sparkling eyes, resigned diamonds to its elders, and all aglow with hope and illusions left point lace to deck the stately shoulders of age along with velvet.
Now fashion is a republic and the only arbiter is a bank balance or credit, and young things frisk it in diamonds, velvet, point lace and sables, and their old grandmothers shiver along in mousseline de soie and chiffon, roses wreathe their golden locks, red locks, black locks, as the case may be, but never their grey locks, and the winds of heaven fan their ageing shoulder-blades. The art of growing old gracefully is so rare that no wonder we cling to the hairdresser and the dressmaker with pathetic hands, just to postpone the evil hour; sometimes we think we have escaped the evil hour altogether. How we do cheat ourselves!
It is perhaps one of the most blessed dispensations of our frail human nature that we do not really know how we look; that when we gaze into a mirror we do not see the sober disillusioning reflection, but rather some fondly imagined image of ourselves. No woman is heroic enough to look her imperfections squarely in the face, or why do we see such curious apparitions? Why does that worn old face hide behind that white veil dotted with black? Because, when she sees her mistaken old features in the glass, then she sees what she longs to see, and when her old heart cannot pump up sufficient pink she dabs on that ghastly rose which has never yet deceived anyone.
Ah, yes, the twentieth century is distinctly reserved for youth—old age is not in it! It is a bad fashion set by that spoilt child of the world—America. The world pays the same deference to America that the average American parent pays to his obstreperous child. Yes, the American child rules the roost, and America rules the world; therefore, what wonder that age grows more and more unpopular.
The other day I saw in several papers that in a certain industry no workman would be employed in future who was more than forty. Put yourself in the place of a man of forty who is shelved and knows of no other way of earning his living! If he becomes a criminal, who can blame him? Recently I read a curious paragraph about the increasing use of hair-dye among working men. Not beer and tobacco, mind you, but just hair-dye! Why? Because employers do not want old workmen. So the men ward off the crime of growing old with hair-dye. Was there ever a more comic tragedy?