CHAPTER V

A last hour of vivid blue and gold glare; but now the twilight sheds softly upon the darting jays, and only the little oval frames catch the fleeting beams.  I go to the miniatures.  Amid the parliamentary faces, all strictly garrotted with many-folded handkerchiefs, there is a metal frame enchased with rubies and a few emeralds.  And this chef d’oeuvre of antique 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 of colour.  How many may love him?  The loveliest may one day smile upon his knee! and shall he renounce all for that little creature who has just finished singing, and is handing round cups of tea?  Every bachelor contemplating marriage says, “I shall have to give up all for one, one.”

The young girl is often pretty but her prettiness is vague and uncertain, it inspires a sort of pitying admiration, but it suggests nothing; the very essence of the young girl’s being is that she should have nothing to suggest, therefore the beauty of the young face fails to touch the imagination.  No past lies hidden in those translucent eyes, no story of hate, disappointment, or sin.  Nor is there