Growing old! A time we talk of, and jest or moralise over, but find almost impossible to realise—at least to ourselves. In others, we can see its approach clearer: yet even then we are slow to recognise it. “What, Miss So-and-so looking old, did you say? Impossible! she is quite a young person: only a year older than I—and that would make her just . … Bless me! I am forgetting how time goes on. Yes,”—with a faint deprecation which truth forbids you to contradict, and politeness to notice,—“I suppose we are neither of us so young as we used to be.”

Without doubt, it is a trying crisis in a woman's life—a single woman's particularly—when she begins to suspect she is “not so young as she used to be;” that, after crying “Wolf” ever since the respectable maturity of seventeen—as some young ladies are fond of doing, to the extreme amusement of their friends—the grim wolf, old age, is actually showing his teeth in the distance; and no courteous blindness on the part of these said friends, no alarmed indifference on her own, can neutralise the fact that he is, if still far off, in sight.