Rensselaer Republican, Volume 22, Number 35, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 1 May 1890 — WOMEN AT 25 TO 30. [ARTICLE]

WOMEN AT 25 TO 30.

Th* Ag» at Wltleh They are MM tm Wm Most EnterLslning. Time was when to be 16 was the best thing that could happen to a young girl. It was the age of dewy freshness, of innocent impressibility, and of all the other delighful but rather verdant virtues which have won the heart of the poet to sopg and wooed the mind of the Sage to something better than his philosophy. But sweet 16 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 acJuaintance with the simplicity of a child. t was a good thing once to be 16 it is a good thiDg now to be 20; to be 25 is better still, but to be 28 is to be blest! “There is no time in a woman’s life when she is so delightful (married or unmarried, but particularly the latter),” sail} an observing man yesterday, “as she is from 26 to 30. 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,” says a woman writer on the N. Y. Sun, “have passed into a poise of manner and a gracious dignity that places her friends at once at their easy best. She has had experience, and that experience has given her a clear understanding of the world ait 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 no illusions to perpefcaate.”

“But there is something to be said on the other side,” said a woman of 26 who heard him. “It may look like 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 25 and 30, In the first place, a 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 teu years at a stroke. If a woman who is only ‘still young’ takes the coy and kittenish role, she makes herself immortally ridiculous, anil deservedly so. She has sometimes even to fear letting herself be spontaneous and natural, lest someone shall dub her the ‘girlish old girl.’ To be older than her years makes a prig of her at once, and men and gods will shun her.

“To 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 judgment that matches his own, and yet she must continually suggest the innocence of 16. To the man between the two she may perhaps be nearer her natural self, and yet even with him she has continually to remember that Bbe must never assume the equality of knowledge or experience or judgment which she is sure she really possesses. She is often truer in her judgments and wiser in her conclusions 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 lulus, it must be ‘with unequal footsteps; or his vanity is wounded. From 25 to 30 » woman has the most difficult part ol her life to live. She has to disssemble in the present, remember from the past and borrow from the future. 8h« may be delightful, but she is far from* being delighted. Do you begin ta. realize it?”