brush in disgust, and stamped with impatience.

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!"

I stared at her open-mouthed, trembling between shrinking and curiosity.

"_It's the shape of the cheeks_!" said Bridget darkly. "Yourself now,
and the ladies of your age, it's pretty, slim bits of faces you have,
going to a peak