| <The Saturday Review October 3, 1868>
| <Old Girls>
| <pb n="450">
| It is a little difficult to disentangle the varied influences 
| which tell on ourselves and on the world in which we live, 
| and still harder perhaps to sort them when fairly 
| disentangled in any definite order of value, but we are 
| inclined on the whole to think that the most powerful of our 
| social influences is that of the Old Girl.  Husbands and 
| wives, old men and maidens, tell of course in some way on 
| the general mass of thoughts and impulses, of lives and 
| characters, around them; but their action is, from the very 
| nature of their domestic position, their personal aims, and 
| their business distractions, limited and indirect.  Without a 
| home, without the ties of a family, unfettered at last by 
| matrimonial aims, relieved by a genteel competence from 
| the cares of business, the Old Girl, on the other hand, bears 
| down upon life with a singleness of aim and a directness of 
| purpose which bids one expect great things.  And no doubt 
| the Old Girl has done great things.  She has built Bath.  She 
| has created Tupper.  She has invented the popular preacher.  
| The sensational novel arose at her call.  The unwritten code 
| of feminine society is a monument of her legislation.  
| Platonic affection is the highest reach of her fancy.  She has 
| taken Evangelicalism captive and darns at it through a 
| month of Exeter Hall.  She has seized Ritualism, and 
| dragged smooth-shaven directors to the feet of their <p> 
| "Mother Superior."  </p> And, but the other day, she took 
| the form of Miss Becker, and with a wild slogan of <q> 
| </q>, drove a host of revising barristers
| <pb n="451">
| like chaff before the wind.  It is impossible to pass with the 
| usual smile of good-humoured contempt before a force 
| such as this; we long instinctively to know more about it, to 
| examine its various elements, to watch it in its origin, its 
| developments, its end.  There is a wide gulf, we see at once, 
| between the Old Girl and the Fading Flower.  The feverish 
| mobility, the half-despairing yet passionate desire to attract, 
| the strange medley of poetry and prose, of sentiment and 
| worldliness, that amused us in the earlier stage, is gone.  
| Life has fairly settled down into a calm monotony.  The 
| Old Girl looks out over the level sands of existence as the 
| colossal forms of Egyptian sculpture look over the desert, 
| with the same grand immobility, with a patience of cards 
| and crochet almost as divine as theirs.  A faint echo, 
| indeed, of the passions of the past ripples up every now and 
| then to die at her feet.  Sometimes there is a lover, old as 
| herself, dying down as she dies into the peace and rest of 
| things, yet jostling against her at intervals to wake the old 
| memories, to renew the old offers.  And then the voice and 
| the look and the touch will bring about a slight attack of 
| <f> </f>, a tear, a headache, ere they pass away.  But they 
| do pass away.  Year after year, it may be, the appeal is 
| renewed, and the pulse quickens, and the tear drops, but the 
| Old Girl remains an Old Girl still.   She muses over it 
| sometimes in moments renewed calm, and wonders how it 
| all can be.  There was a time, she owns, when the very 
| uncertainty was pleasant, when the mere freedom of choice 
| was delightful, when there was a strange sense of power in 
| having a lover at her feet, in the faith that, though rejected, 
| a year would bring him to the same feet again.  He is there 
| still, but the old pleasure is gone.  She recalls, with a 
| strange bewilderment of heart, how near she has been more 
| than once to that impossible <p> "Yes"</p> ~~ near 
| enough even to devise little plots for the discovery whether 
| she were loved for her own love's sake ~~ and how the 
| little plots all proved her wooer true, and how the <p> 
| "Yes" </p> remained impossible still.  Again and again she 
| has brought herself to the brink, and has peeped over and 
| run away.  She cannot conquer the trouble, this panic, this 
| overpowering dismay at the thought of change.  Life has 
| fixed her in its grooves, has settled her into habits and 
| places and times, has crystallized her tastes and sentiment, 
| her likings and dislikings, her hopes and fears.  Years have 
| brought knowledge, and with it a fear that casteth out love.  
| Is it possible to trust that sober, middle-aged, unromantic 
| wooer so completely, now that passion has ceased to be 
| blind?  Is it likely that two people whose lives have taken 
| their own peculiar mould will be able to fuse their lives into 
| one?  And, after all, is it worth while to incur such risks for 
| what must be a pale passionless friendship?  There are 
| moments when the woman's heart wakes up in the Old Girl, 
| and she almost hates the good-tempered, commonplace 
| suitor as he pleads his faithfulness, as he promises her 
| constant affection and esteem.  Why didn't he force her into 
| happiness when something more was possible than 
| affection and esteem?  But it is only for a moment, and 
| again the heart settles down into peace.  The passionate 
| longing dies into the dreamy chaunt of the Lotos-eater: ~~
| <q> </q>
| And so the Old Girl settles down to Egyptian immobility 
| and her work-table.  The only trace of the past that the 
| outer world can see about her is that her dress, like that of 
| the clergy, manages somehow to lag a little behind its day.  
| She employs the same milliners, she patronizes the same 
| bonnet-shop; if she falls back on the friendly aid of a little 
| rouge or kohl, it is precisely the same kohl and rouge that 
| her butterfly niece uses.  But somehow the general effect 
| lags, as we said, about a twelvemonth behind.  There is 
| nothing else, however, to remind men of the past. 
| <reg orig="No one"> No-one </reg> is more busy with the 
| present.  <reg orig="No one"> No-one </reg> is so full of 
| its fun and its follies, <reg orig="no one"> no-one </reg> 
| so well up in the last novel and the latest scandal, as the 
| Old Girl.  Not that she is really very scandalous or 
| romantic.  What she really wants is occupation; and the 
| occupation that life gives to others in a thousand cares of 
| children and butchers' bills she has to make for herself.  
| And so she flings herself with an intense energy into the 
| chaos of little things.  Little engagements, little pleasures, 
| minute particles of business, the tiniest tittle-tattle, all are 
| so many weapons against the dreary inactivity of her life.  
| She seasons and spices it well with little outbreaks of 
| temper, with moods and fancies and glooms and humours, 
| in the hope of relieving its tastelessness.  She gilds it over 
| with thin layers of literature, of art, of poetry; she brightens 
| it now and then with a delicate gourmandise.  It is amusing 
| to hear the Old Girl discuss the merits of an 
| <hi rend="italic"> entree, </hi> and laugh at the tender maiden 
| who dislikes Madeira.  Above all, she fights against the 
| lovelessness of her life.  She caricatures the affection she 
| has missed by a succession of pets.  There is a sly humour 
| in the way in which she comforts a love-lorn Ophelia by 
| the story of her sorrow over her favourite tabby, and how a 
| gracious Providence brought her through it.  There is a 
| charming irony in the legacy of her last lapdog to the wooer 
| who has wooed her for half a century.  But her sympathies 
| are far from stopping short at tabbies and lapdogs.  She 
| pours out her passion for pets on the scapegrace nephew in 
| the Guards, and on the meek curate at the Parsonage.  She 
| turns-the one into a <hi rend="italic"> roue, </hi> and the 
| other into a clerical fop.  On the clergy indeed the Old Girl 
| delights to show forth her power.  Sometimes she likes to 
| snub them.  We once knew an Old Girl who took up her 
| abode at a bishop's house with the simple design of 
| persecuting young deacons.  It was delightful to watch her 
| as she caught them in the freshness of their zeal, lured them 
| into the revelation of their hopes and plans, and then 
| informed them that she had heard all this a hundred times 
| before, and never knew much good come of new brooms.  
| It was the very helplessness of these young Levites that 
| made the game so perfectly diverting as she induced them 
| to read the pious little tracts she wrote for Paternoster Row, 
| or to chat with her on the lawn, or to take her down to 
| dinner, and then in the very moment of their highest 
| ecstacies entertained an archdeacon by breaking them on 
| the wheel.  Sometimes the Old Girl prefers to rout the 
| clergy up.  She sees that they do their duty.  She looks in on 
| the sick cases to make sure they have been attended to.  She 
| tastes the port wine and the soup that the curate has left.  
| She takes notes during the sermon, and sends in the 
| morning a score of doubtful passages, with a request that 
| the preacher will be good enough to reconcile them with 
| certain texts which she has kindly annexed.  She watches 
| over the orthodoxy of his vestments, and circumvents a 
| dawning tendency towards preaching in a surplice by the 
| seasonable gift of a new silk gown.  The most eminent 
| example of this sort of clerical supervision which we 
| remember to have met with was Mrs. Hannah More.  Those 
| who have read the biography of that very eminent and 
| typical Old Girl will remember the terror she diffused 
| throughout the clergy of the West, how foxhunting ceased 
| and port wine retired beneath the table, how she made 
| circuits of the churches that she might catechize the 
| preacher in the vestry, how, when her clerical victim 
| barricaded himself in his study, she called up the servants 
| and prayed for his conversion in the hall.  Hannah Mores 
| have rather gone out of fashion just now, or rather they 
| have walked over into the opposite camp.  The <p> 
| "Mother Superior" </p> is the Old Girl of the new 
| movement.  The fussiness, the kindness, the severity, the 
| humours, the pettiness, the eccentricities, the real good 
| sense and warmheartedness of Old Girlhood receive their 
| consecration under the veil and the poke-bonnet.  A host of 
| little services, of little bells tinkling at odd moments, invest 
| with an air of piety the waste of a day.  Scandal becomes 
| obedience when the sister is pledged to reveal all to the 
| motherly ear; despotism becomes discipline when it is 
| hallowed into a rule; prudery becomes purity when it retires 
| from the world into its cell.  This is not perhaps the highest 
| aim of woman, or the sublime consummation which at first 
| sight it seems to be, but at any rate it is better than mere 
| unrelieved tittle-tattle, or the bitter bigotry that fights for 
| the last trick over the card-tables of Cheltenham or Bath.
| But, after all, extremes like these are but the fringe of Old 
| Girlhood ~~ extremes into which it plunges when it is 
| roused into an activity that is not its own.  Kind, 
| good-tempered, a little sentimental, a little prosaic, the really 
| characteristic atmosphere of an Old Girl is the atmosphere 
| of rest.  The ample form, the yet ampler folds of her silken 
| robe, give a promise of largeness and toleration and 
| good-humour which the energetic woman of married life can 
| seldom afford.  Schoolboys run to her for toffy; schoolgirls 
| pour into the sympathizing breast the raptures and despairs 
| of their earliest love; and weary men, tired of the stress and 
| racket of life, somehow like to come there too, to leave 
| behind them all the movement and ambition of their 
| existence without, and to find at any rate in one circle the 
| quietude and repose which they find nowhere else.  It is the 
| memory of such pleasant resting-places in the journey of 
| life that makes us whisper our <hi rend="italic"> 
| Requiescat in Pace </hi> over the grave of the Old Girl.