OLD MAIDS.

Otago Witness, Issue 1383, 1 June 1878, Page 17

OLD MAIDS.

A woman may be an old maid in other people's eyes, but not in her own, and likewise — though, of course, this is a rare case — she may be an old maid in her own opinion, but not in that of somebody else. Furthermore, she may have the good sense to know that she is an old maid, but the weakness to wish that no one else should think so. This, perhaps, is a very common situation. But no rule can be laid down by which it can be ascertained, as a statistical fact, that a woman is, for good and all, an old maid. It is like the North, in Pope's "Essay on Man":— Ask where's the North j at York, 'tis on the Tweed ; In Scotland, at the Orcades ; and there, At Greenland, Zembla, or the Lord knows where. Smiling eighteen thinks three-and-twenty awfully old. A bride of twentyfour considers that she has six more years to run, before her youth is gone. At thirty, a woman sighs, and resigns herself to the fact that, in another decade, she will really be old. By forty, whioh is, roughly speaking, the meridian of a woman's life, sensible married women give themselves no more trouble about their age, and take to piety, gossip, politics, or . cookery, for the rest of their lives. Unmarried women, however, do not manifest an equal amount of resignation. A lady novelist lately remarked that the things we most regret are things we have never had ; and the observation is strictly true, at any rate of her own sex. But it is hardly possible to regret a thing we have never had, without cherishing a lurking hope that we still may get it.