one's own husband--Wow!--they go
in like a harpoon. And they have given me a great deal to think about.
There are times, I find, when I can accept that intimation of slipping
into the sere and yellow leaf without revolt. Then the next moment it
fills me with a sort of desperation. I refuse to go up on the shelf. I
see red and storm against age. I refuse to bow to the inevitable. My
spirit recoils at the thought of decay. For when you're fading you're
surely decaying, and when you're decaying you're approaching the end.
So stop, Father Time, stop, or I'll get out of the car!

But we can't get out of the car. That's the tragic part of it. We have
to go on, whether we like it or not. We have to buck up, and grin and
bear it, and make the best of a bad bargain. And Heaven knows I've
never wanted to be one of the Glooms! I've no hankering to sit with
the Sob Sisters and pump brine over the past. I'm light-hearted enough
if they'll only give me a chance. I've always believed in getting what
we could out of life and looking on the sunny side of things. And the
disturbing part of it is, I don't _feel_ withered--not by a jugful!
There are mornings when I can go about my homely old duties singing
like a prairie Tetrazzini. There are days when I could do a
hand-spring, if for nothing more than to shock my solemn old
Dinky-Dunk out of his dourness. There are times when we go skimming
along the trail with the crystal-cool evening air in our faces and the
sun dipping down toward the rim of the world when I want to thank
Somebody I can't see for Something-or-other I can't define. _Dum
vivimus vivamus._

But it seems hard to realize that I'm a sedate and elderly lady
already on the shady side of thirty. A woman over thirty years
old--and I can remember the days of my intolerant youth when I
regarded the woman of thirty as an antiquated creature who should be
piously preparing herself for the next world. And it doesn't take
thirty long to slip into forty. And then forty merges into fifty--and
there you are, a nice old lady with nervous indigestion and
knitting-needles and a tendency to breathe audibly after ascending the
front-stairs. No wonder, last night, it drove me to taking a volume of
George Moore down from the shelf and reading his chapter on "The Woman
of Thirty." But I found small consolation in that over-uxorious essay,
feeling as I did that I knew life quite as well as any amorous
studio-rat who ever made copy out of his m