Helen Vardon's Confession

Prologue

To every woman there comes a day (and that all too soon) when she
receives the first hint that Time, the harvester, has not passed her by
unnoticed. The waning of actual youth may have passed with but the
faintest regret, if any; regret for the lost bud being merged in the
triumph at the glory of the opening blossom. But the waning of womanhood
is another matter. Old age has no compensations to offer for those
delights that it steals away. At least, that is what I understand from
those who know, for I must still speak on the subject from hearsay,
having received from Father Time but the very faintest and most delicate
hint on the subject.

I was sitting at my dressing-table brushing out my hair, which is of a
docile habit, though a thought bulky, when amidst the black tress--
blacker than it used to be when I was a girl--I noticed a single white
hair. It was the first that I had seen, and I looked at it dubiously,
picking it out from its fellows to see if it were all white, and noticing
how like it was to a thread of glass. Should I pluck it out and pretend
that it was never there? Or should I, more thriftily--for a hair is a
hair after all, and enough of them will make a wig--should I dye it and
hush up its treason?

I smiled at the foolish thought. What a to-do about a single white hair!
I have seen girls in their twenties with snow-white hair and looking as
sweet as lavender. As to this one, I would think of it as a souvenir from
the troubled past rather than a harbinger of approaching age; and with
this I swept my brush over it and buried it even as I had buried those
sorrows and those dreadful experiences which might have left me
white-headed years before.

But that glassy thread, buried once more amid the black, left a legacy of
suggestion. Those hideous days were long past now. I could look back on
them unmoved--nay, with a certain serene interest. Suppose I should
write the history of them? Why not? To write is not necessarily to
publish. And if, perchance, no eye but mine shall see these lines until
the little taper of my life has burned down into its socket, then what
matters it to me whether praise or blame, sympathy or condemnation, be my
portion. Posterity has no gifts to offer that I need court its suffrages.