In a frenzy of impatience I seized the two long plaits, and twisted them now this way, now that. Astonishing the difference which hair-dressing can make! I have read of a heroine who passed successfully as her own twin sister by the simple device of plainly brushed hair and puritanical garments, the sister, of course, sporting marcelle waves and Parisian costumes. I dipped my brush in the water-jug and dragged back my own hair in a plastered mass, clamping the plaits to my head. I looked like a Dutch doll! Clean and chubby, and, alas! considerably younger than before. I parted it in the middle, and glued it over my ears. I looked like a naughty schoolgirl, who had had her hair dressed by a maiden aunt. I piled the plaits in a coronet over my forehead; I looked like a portrait of a Norwegian damsel dressed for her bridal. I threw down the brush in disgust, and stamped with impatience. No use! Not a bit of use! All the hair-dressing in the world could not make me look old, or even approximately middle-aged. The ugliest flannel blouse that was ever made, while it would certainly be hideously unbecoming, could not add one year, let alone ten, to my age. It was a bitter blow. All that morning I went about pondering the desperate question of how to look old. Aunt Emmeline had prophesied that I should know soon enough, "with those beaked features," but I wanted to know _now_, not in any permanent, disagreeable fashion, but as a kind of sleight-of-hand trick, by which I could be mature one day and the next in blooming youth. Elderly in London, young at Pastimes. A douce, unremarkable "body" in the basement flat, and in Surrey a lady of leisure, rings on her fingers and bells on her toes! Aunt Eliza would have cried once more, "Oh, don't be silly!" if I had confronted her with such a problem. I said, "Don't be silly!" to myself many times over in the course of that day, but I persisted in being silly all the same. At the back of my mind lingered the conviction that if I went on thinking long enough a solution would come. _How could I manage to look old_? I asked the question of myself every hour of the next few days. I asked it of everyone I met, and was fatuously assured that I demanded the impossible; at long last I asked it of old Bridget, whose sound common sense had come to my rescue times and again. "Sure, my dear, your husband will manage that for you!" was Bridget's instant solution. "Not the husband I shall choose!" I replied with easy assurance. A moment's pause was devoted to the problematical Prince Charming whose mission it would be to keep _me young_, then I asked tentatively:-- "What shall I look like, Bridget, when I am old?" Bridget folded her arms and regarded me with a critical stare.