against every sign of
her age, as some women foolishly do. The result was in Lady Mariamne's
case, as in many others, that the number of her years looked more like a
hundred and fifty than their natural limit. A woman of her class has but
two alternatives as she gets old. She must get stout, in which case,
though she becomes unwieldy, she preserves something of her bloom; or
she may grow thin, and become a spectre upon which art has to do so much
that nature, flouted and tortured, becomes vindictive, and withdraws
every modifying quality. Lady Mariamne had, I fear, false hair, false
teeth, false complexion, everything that invention could do in a
poor little human countenance intended for no such manipulation. The
consequence was that every natural advantage (and there are some which
age confers, as well as many that age takes away) was lost. The skin was
parchment, the eyes were like eyes of fishes, the teeth--too white and
too perfect--looked like the horrible things in the dentists' windows,
which was precisely what they were. On such a woman, the very height
of the fashion, to which she so often attaches herself with desperation,
has an antiquated air. Everything "swears," as the French say,
with everything else. The softness, the whiteness, the ease, the
self-abnegation of advancing age are all so many ornaments if people
but knew. But Lady Mariamne had none of these. She wore a warm cloak
in her carriage, it is true, but that had dropped from her shoulders,
leaving her in all the bound-up rigidity in which youth is trim and
slim and elastic, as becomes it. It is true that many a woman of fifty
is, as John Tatham was, serenely dwelling on that tableland which
shows but little difference between thirty-five, the crown of life, and
fifty-five; but Lady Mariamne was not one of these. She had gone "too
fast," she would herself have allowed; "the pace" had been too much for
such survivals. She was of the awful order of superannuated beauties of
which Mr. Rider Haggard would in vain persuade us "She" was not one. I
am myself convinced that "She's" thousands of years were all written on
her fictitious complexion, and that other people saw them clearly if not
her unfortunate lover. And Lady Mariamne had come to be of the order of
"She." By dint of wiping out the traces of her fifty years, she had made
herself look as if she might have been a thousand, and in this guise she
appeared to the robust, ruddy, well-preserved man of