o quick. It isn't like woollen stuff.

If you could look back half a century and see Gwendolen on the terrace
then, you would not be grateful to any contemporary malicious enough to
murmur in your ear:--"Old Lady Blank, the octogenarian, who died last
week, was this girl then. So reflect upon what the conventions are quite
in earnest--for once--in calling your latter end." You would probably
dodge the subject, replying--for instance--"How funny! Why, it must have
taken twelve yards to make a skirt like that!" For these were the days
of crinolines; of hair in cabbage-nets, packed round rubber-inflations;
of what may be called proto-croquet, with hoops so large that no one
ever failed to get through, except you and me; the days when _Ah che la
morte_ was the last new tune, and Landseer and Mulready the last words
in Art. They were the days when there had been but one Great
Exhibition--think of it!--and the British Fleet could still get under
canvas. We, being an old fogy, would so much like to go back to those
days--to think of daguerreotypes as a stupendous triumph of Science,
balloons as indigenous to Cremorne, and table-turning as a nine-days'
wonder; in a word, to feel our biceps with satisfaction in an epoch when
wheels went slow, folk played tunes, and nobody had appendicitis. But we
can't!

However, it is those very days into which the story looks back and sees
this girl with the golden hair, who has been waiting in that
rainbow-glory fifty years ago for it to go on and say what it may of
what followed. She comes out on the terrace through the high
middle-window that opens on it, and now she stands in the blinding
gleam, shading her eyes with her hand. It is late in July, and one may
listen for a blackbird's note in vain. That song in the ash that drips a
diamond-shower on the soaked lawn, whenever the wind breathes, may still
be a thrush; his last song, perhaps, about his second family, before he
retires for the season. The year we thought would last us out so well,
for all we wished to do in it, will fail us at our need, and we shall
find that the summer we thought was Spring's success will be Autumn,
much too soon, as usual. Over half a century of years have passed since
then, and each has played off its trick upon us. Each Spring has said to
us:--"Now is your time for life. Live!" and each Summer has jilted us
and left us to be consoled by Autumn, a Job's comforter who only
says:--"Make the best of me while yo