Once upon a time, the matron who had reached the very alarming age of thirty years was quietly invited by public opinion to consider herself old and to dress in a manner that would have made even an Egyptian mummy look worse. She wore bonnets with strings to hide the cruel marks of time behind her ears and under her chin. And she would have perished in shame before she donned anything more hilarious in color than mourning black or battleship gray.
After a while, the women forgot to be old and to retire to the shelf, then they forgot it at forty, then at fifty, and sixty, and nowadays the person who can persuade a woman of seventy that she is anything but mere bud is something of a Demos.
We confess we like it. It looks fine, so we think, to see social gatherings composed of young misses and their grandmothers. And one of the pleasant effects of the changed attitude is in the women's looks. The somber colors are gone; or at least the young people are wearing them instead of the old.
It used to be thought that old ladies ought to branch out no further toward gayety than lavender and purple. Fortunately, it has been discovered that no color is more unbecoming to age than shades of purple unless the woman who wears them has high color. If there is anything that can make a woman look faded, it is to don a heavy, cheerless gray and then stick a little lavender about on her bonnet or at her throat. It is only the high-colored, fresh-looking young girls who can wear lavender and purple and get away with them. 