Alas! the world clamours for youth. White hairs compel no reverence. Age only suggests to brisk young things that the old people are not up with the times. What wonder, then, that the world caters for youth, and nobody takes the trouble any more to create fashions for old ladies?
If there is an institution which more than others wards off the coming of age, it is certainly the great shops. Twice a year these arbiters of fashion sacrifice themselves for the good of the public. Then do they guilelessly re-mark the treasures of their warehouses with those tempting signs which produce on the British public the effect of hasheesh on the native of India. Beware of those peaceful and alluring pirates of Oxford and Regent Streets, O frail women who draggle last year's chiffons in this year's mud, and go to the greengrocers in the shopworn glory of the year before last. During sale-days the British matron lives in a state of ecstasy. To buy is bliss; to buy cheap is rapture. Cotton laces intoxicate her, and so does chiffon. She buys summer dresses in winter, and furs when the July sun bakes the sweltering town. That nothing is of any earthly use is of no consequence. Nor is it of consequence that what she buys is youthful, and she is old. It is these enchanting sale-days that explain the Englishwoman's orgies of wax beads, picture hats, party frocks at the wrong time, paper-soled slippers and open-worked stockings in pouring rain.
"A strong race, these English," an envious American said to me the other day.
"That's because they kill the weak ones off," I explained. "To be a perfect Englishwoman you must be able to sit with your poor bare shoulders against an open window at a winter dinner-party, preferably in an icy draught, and you must smile. If you can survive that you are one of the elect. It ensures you a social position, because you cannot have a social position in England if you cover up your shoulders."
I wish I could offer up an earnest plea for covered shoulders, at least for the aged! It seems to me when a brave woman has imperilled her life for forty years, nobly defying the cold blasts on the wrong side of the dining-table, and after she has got her young brood safely married, it does seem as if she then might retire to the well-earned comfort of a high dress without losing her position in society. But to cover up those poor melancholy shoulders is to announce the oldest kind of old age, and what woman has the courage for that?
There is no doubt that old age first went out of fashion when the bicycle came in, for age was no barrier to its keen enjoyment. But grandmother could not bicycle in a cap, and so she put on a billycock hat instead; necessity obliged her to show her ankles, and exhilaration led her to "scorch." It was then we asked in some perplexity for the first time, "Where have the aged gone?"
Still let us cling to youth, it is our modern prerogative as women; but only let us cling to it to a certain extent—to the extent that life amuses, but does not hurt. There are some of us who still have emotions at an age when, had we lived in our grandmothers' day, we should already have found permanent refuge in big frilled caps. We hardly realise the safeguard there was in a cap. It was the final chord to show that the symphony of youth had come to an end.
In the days of our grandparents it was the men who kept young, while the women were old at thirty-five; but in these days men are considered old in their prime, and it is the women who cling to eternal youth. Yes, indeed, the modern tendency requires readjustment. But after all, does it pay to try and keep young when one is really tired and scant of breath?
Let it go, even the loveliest youth, in its own good time. Have we not each had our turn at it? But one thing there is to which we should all cling with might and main, and that is a young heart, for a young heart has the only youth which is immortal. It will make of any woman, when the time comes, what is more rare and lovely than a young beauty, it will make her a charming old woman—and nothing in this wide world can be more charming, even if it is a little out of fashion.