TWO WONDERFUL OLD LADIES
It is a pity that our language has no other word to
indicate that one has lived seventy, eighty, or ninety
years, than the word “old”; for the word
“old” carries with it implications of “senility”
and decrepitude, which many merely chronologically
“old” people very properly resent.
The word “young,” similarly, needs the
assistance of another word, for we all know individuals
of thirty and forty, sometimes even only twenty, whom
it is as absurd to call “young” as it is
to call those others of seventy, eighty, or ninety,
“old.”
“Youth” is too large and rich a word to
serve the limited purpose of numbering the years of
undeveloped boys and girls. It should stand rather
for the vital principle in men and women, ever expanding,
and rebuilding, and refreshing the human organism,
partly a physical, but perhaps in a greater degree
a spiritual energy.
I am not writing this out of any compliment to two
wonderful “old” ladies of whom I am particularly
thinking. They would consider me a dunce were
they to suspect me of any such commonplace intent.
No! I am not going to call them “eighty
years young,” or employ any of those banal euphemisms
with which would-be “tactful” but really
club-footed sentimentalists insult the intelligence
of the so-called “old.” Of course,
I know that they are both eighty or thereabouts, and
they know very well that I know. We make no secret
of it. Why should we? Actually though the
number of my years falls short of eighty, I feel so
much older than either of them, that it never occurs
to me to think of them as “old,” and often
as I contemplate their really glowing energetic youth,
I grow melancholy for myself, and wonder what has become
of my own.
They were schoolgirls together. Luccia married
Irene’s brother—for they allow me
the privilege of calling them by their Christian names—and
they have been friends all their lives. Sometimes
I see them together, though oftener apart, for Luccia
and her white-haired poet husband—no “older”
than herself,—are neighbours of mine in
the country, and Irene lives for the most part in
New York—as much in love with its giant
developments as though she did not also cherish memories
of that quaint, almost vanished, New York of her girlhood
days; for she is nothing if not progressive.
But I will tell about Luccia first, and the first
thing it is natural to speak of—so every
one else finds too—is her beauty. They
say that she was beautiful when she was young (I am
compelled sometimes, under protest, to use the words
“young” and “old” thus chronologically)
and, of course, she must have been. I have, however,
seen some of her early portraits, before her hair
was its present beautiful colour, and I must confess
that the Luccia of an earlier day does not compare
with the Luccia of today. I don’t think
I should have fallen in love with her then, whereas
