These two are mutually “other women,” and the second one has the best of it, for there is no thorn in feminine flesh like the rejected lover who finds consolation elsewhere.  It may be exceedingly pleasant to be a man’s first love, but she is wise beyond books who chooses to be his last, and it is foolish to spend mental effort upon old flames, rather than in watching for new ones, for Caesar himself is not more utterly dead than a man’s dead love.

Women are commonly supposed to worry about their age, but Father Time is a trouble to men also.  The girl of twenty thinks it absurd for women to be concerned about the matter, but the hour eventually comes when she regards the subject with reverence akin to awe.  There is only one terror in it—­the dreadful nines.

[Sidenote:  Scylla and Charybdis]

“Twenty-nine!” Might she not as well be thirty?  There is little choice between Scylla and Charybdis.  Twenty-nine is the hour of reckoning for every woman, married, engaged, or unattached.

The married woman felicitates herself greatly, unless a tall daughter of nine or ten walks abroad at her side.  The engaged girl is safe—­she rejoices in the last hours of her lingering girlhood and hems table linen with more resignation.  The unattached girl has a strange interest in creams and hair tonics, and usually betakes herself to the cloister of the university for special courses, since azure hosiery does not detract from woman’s charm in the eyes of the faculty.

Men do not often know their ages accurately till after thirty.  The gladsome heyday of youth takes no note of the annual milestones.  But after thirty, ah me!  “Yes,” a man will say sometimes, “I am thirty-one, but the fellows tell me I don’t look a day over twenty-nine.”  Scylla and Charybdis again!

[Sidenote:  Perennial Youth]

Still, age is not a matter of birthdays, but of the heart.  Some women are mature cynics at twenty, while a grey-haired matron of fifty seems to have found the secret of perennial youth.  There is little to choose, as regards beauty and charm, between the young, unformed girl, whose soft eyes look with longing into the unyielding future which gives her no hint of its purposes, and the mature woman, well-groomed, self-reliant to her finger-tips, who has drunk deeply of life’s cup and found it sweet.  A woman is never old until the little finger of her glove is allowed to project beyond the finger itself and she orders her new photographs from an old plate in preference to sitting again.

In all the seven ages of man, there is someone whom she may attract.  If she is twenty-five, the boy who has just attained long trousers will not buy her striped sticks of peppermint and ask shyly if he may carry her books.  She is not apt to wear fraternity pins and decorate her rooms in college colours, unless her lover still holds his alma mater in fond remembrance.  But there are others, always the others—­and is it less sweet to inspire the love which lasts than the tender verses of a Sophomore?  Her field of action is not sensibly limited, for at twenty men love woman, at thirty a woman, and at forty, women.