Foreword

Ladies' Mirror, Volume I, Issue 9, 1 March 1923, Page 5

Foreword

fjow far away, remote and legendary already, JLx seem types, familiar and commonplace, of a generation or two ago—“the old maid,” for example ! She has now quite definitely ceased to exist, save in the pages of fiction, where she will long continue to be a valuable and valued “property.” There are no “old maids” among the present generation of women, and there certainly will not be any among the girls growing up. Life is too full, too varied for women now-a-days—also perhaps too hard for any of them to take up the role of the women so common in days when Mrs. Gashel! wrote “Cranford.” Some may come to regret the dignified leisure, the exquisite households, the comfortable life of ease and quiet, the genteel gossip, the delicate interests, tine aloofness from all that was vulgar, the ignorance of all that was sordid, the high standard of refinement, the child-like innocence of mind that made for child-like peace of soul; but the world holds now no corner for “old maids.” The standard of age has altered. At thirty a woman, if married, was a “matron” with cap and shawl, forbidden bright colours or anything that

savoured of frivolity; if unmarried, well on the way to complete “old maid-dom.” Now she has only to bob her hair, wear a dress like a bolster case, to look (and feel) a “flapper” with the world before her. No, the real old maid, an artificial product of a very artificial epoch, has gone, with her wool mats, her wax flowers, her cats, parrots, tea-drinking and kindly gossip. One hopes that in her passing she has taken with her that packet of old love-letters tied with pale blue ribbon that was jealously hoarded together with some sentimental relic such as a white glove, a faded flower, or a ball programme, which, redolent of blighted romance and secret heartbreak, was suffered to be the key to her renunciation of the world. For, if we have a kindly, even a regretful backward glance for the old maid, our point of view, which has swerved like a weathercock in a gale, has no patience with that blighted romance, and is dreadfully bored by that packet of letters. Or is it a case of “sour grapes,” and are we vexed by a sense of something we have —perhaps for ever?