ON A PAINTED FACE


The other day I met in the street a young lady who, but yesterday, seemed
to me a young girl. She had in the interval taken that sudden leap from
youth to maturity which is always so wonderful and perplexing. When I had
seen her last there would have been no impropriety in giving her a kiss in
the street. Now I should as little have thought of offering to kiss her as
of whistling to the Archbishop of Canterbury if I had seen that dignitary
passing on the other side of the road. She had taken wing and flown from
the nest. She was no longer a child: she was a personage. I found myself
trying (a little clumsily) to adapt my conversation to her new status, and
when I left her I raised my hat a trifle more elaborately than is my
custom.

But the thing that struck me most about her, and the thing that has set me
writing about her, was this: I noticed that her face was painted and
powdered. Now if there is one thing I abominate above all others it is a
painted face. On the stage, of course, it is right and proper. The stage is
a world of make-believe, and it is the business of the lady of sixty to
give you the impression that she is a sweet young thing of seventeen. There
is no affectation in this. It is her vocation to be young, and she follows
it as willingly or unwillingly as you or I follow our respective callings.
At the moment, for example, I would do anything to escape writing this
article, for the sun is shining in the bluest of April skies and the bees
are foraging in the orchard, and everything calls me outside to the woods
and hills. But I must bake my tale of bricks first with as much pretence of
enjoying the job as possible. And in the same way, and perhaps sometimes
with the same distaste, the Juliet of middle age puts on the bloom of the
Juliet of seventeen.