The Globe-republican., 1890-01-15
WOMEN At TwENTY-opp.
The Age ut Which They Are Said to b
Most Entertaining.


The Ago ut Which They Are Said to He
Most Entertaining.
Time was when to be sixteen was the
best thing that could happen to a young
girl. 1t was the age of dewey fresh
ness, Of innocent impressibility, and of
all the other delightful but rather
verdant virtues which have won the
heart of the poet to song and wooed the
mind of the sage to something better
than his philosophy. But sweet six
teen is in short dresses to-day, and still
under the rule of her governess. Her
affections have not yet departed from
her dolls, and she treats the few young
men OF her acquaintance with the SIM
plicity of a child. 1t was good thing
once to be sixteen; it is good thing
now to be twenty; to be twenty-five is
better still, but to be twenty-eight is to
be blest!
There is no time in woman's life
when she is so delightful (married or
unmarried, but particularly the latter),"
said an observing man yesterday, las
she is from twenty-five to thirty. She
still has the enthusiasm of youth. and
much of the tolerant sense of middle
life. Her judgment is mature, and her
opinions carry weight. The shyness
and timidity of her girlhood have passed
into pOise of manner and a gracious
dignity that places her friends at once
at their easy best. She has had expert
ence, and that experience has given
her clear understanding of the world
as it really is and of herself without
illusions. Therefore her estimates and
criticisms of life are sharp and sure and
usually to be trusted, because she has no
theories to bolster up and illusions to
perpetuate."
but there is something to be said on
the other side" said woman of twenty
six who heard him. 1T may look very
smooth sailing from the outside, but one
can have little idea how much tact it
takes to steer straight in the narrow
path of the five years that lie between
twenty-five and thirty. In the first
place, woman at that age hardly
knows where to place herself. She is
neither young nor old. She is what
Julian Hawthorne calls still young
and the little adjective adds ten years at
a stroke. If a woman who is only still
young takes the coy and kittenish role,
she makes herself Immortality ridicu-
lous, and deservedly so. She has some
thing even to fear letting herself be
spontaneous and natural, lest some one
shall dub her the 'girlish old girl To
be older than her years makes prig of
her at once, and men and gods will
shun her.
10 the very young man she must be
grandmotherly without hurting his dear
little vanity by superior wisdom and
patronage. To the middle-aged man she
must respond with a maturity of judg-
ment that matches his own, and yet she
must continually suggest the innocence
of sixteen. To the man between the
two she may perhaps be nearest her nat
ural self, and yet even with him she has
continually to remember that she must
never assume the equality of knowledge
or experience or judgment which she is
sure she really possesses. She is often
truer in her judgment and wiser in her
than he is; he must never
suspect it. She may be cleverer than
he, but she must be clever enough to
conceal it. She must follow him always.
but, like little julius, it must be with
unequal footsteps or his vanity is
wounded. From twenty-five to thirty
woman has the most difficult part of her
life to live. She has to dissemble in the
present, remember from the past and
borrow from the future. She may be
delightful, but she is far from being de-
lighted. Do you begin to realize it?'-
n. Y. Sun.