workmanship surrounds a sharp, shrewdish, modern face, withal pretty. Fair
she is and thin.

She is a woman of thirty,--no,--she is the woman of thirty. Balzac has
written some admirable pages on this subject; my memory of them is vague
and uncertain, although durable, as all memories of him must be. But that
marvellous story, or rather study, has been blunted in my knowledge of this
tiny face with the fine masses of hair drawn up from the neck and arranged
elaborately on the crown. There is no fear of plagiary; he cannot have said
all; he cannot have said what I want to say.

Looking at this face so mundane, so intellectually mundane, I see why a
young man of refined mind--a bachelor who spends at least a pound a day on
his pleasures, and in whose library are found some few volumes of modern
poetry--seeks his ideal in a woman of thirty.

It is clear that, by the very essence of her being, the young girl may
evoke no ideal but that of home; and home is in his eyes the antithesis of
freedom, desire, aspiration. He longs for mystery, deep and endless, and he
is tempted with a foolish little illusion--white dresses, water colour
drawings, and popular music. He dreams of Pleasure, and he is offered Duty;
for do not think that that sylph-like waist does not suggest to him a yard
of apron string, cries of children, and that most odious word, "Papa." A
young man of refined mind can look through the glass of the years.

He has sat in the stalls, opera-glass in hand; he has met women of thirty
at balls, and has sat with them beneath shadowy curtains; he knows that the
world is full of beautiful women, all waiting to be loved and amused, the
circles of his immediate years are filled with feminine faces, they cluster
like flowers on this side and that, and they fade into garden-like spaces