Part 37

LXIX

PREPAREDNESS FOR OLD AGE

What are you storing up for your old age? Are you laying up any money against the time when you will be old and feeble and no longer able to work? The hour will strike for you, as it does for others, when your earning powers will be gone. Your hands will be too stiff and clumsy to keep on with their accustomed task. Your mind will be too slow to go the pace in the fierce competition in the commercial world. If you are an employee, you will lose your job. If you are a business man, you will find that your trade has somehow drifted away from you. If you are a professional man, you will be superseded by the new men whose stars are just rising on the horizon.

Nothing that you can do will alter these conditions. No miracle will save you from the common fate of all who grow old. But if you have saved up enough money to make you independent, it will be merely a matter of mild regret to you. If, however, you have laid up nothing for the rainy day that is bound to come to you, it will be a tragedy that you will pray death to end.

For in all the world there are no people so piteous and forlorn as those who are forced to eat the bitter bread of dependence in their old age, and find how steep are the stairs of another man’s house. Wherever they go they know themselves unwelcome. Wherever they are, they feel themselves a burden. There is no humiliation of the spirit they are not forced to endure. Their hearts are scarred all over with the stabs from cruel and callous speeches.

In youth money is a convenience, an aid to pleasure. In age it is an absolute necessity, for when we are old we have to buy even consideration and politeness from those about us. This is true even in the households of our own children, for between the father and mother who are able to pay their own way and are the source of a never-ending flow of gifts and treats, and the father and mother who must be supported is a great gulf fixed. It is the difference between having the place of honor and the back seat; between being listened to with respect and having one’s opinions derided; between having one’s little peculiarities catered to as interesting characteristics and being snubbed for one’s old-fashioned ways.

Nor is this as unfeeling and hard-boiled as it seems. The average young couple has all it can do, in these times of the high cost of living, to provide for itself and the children, and it makes the burden crushing to have to add the extra weight of the support of the old people of the families.

The fate of the dependent old is so terrible that it is a marvel that it does not frighten every one into trying to provide against it. Yet it was recently stated in a journal of statistics that 80 per cent of the men and women more than sixty years of age were dependent either upon their children or upon public charity. Don’t let this misfortune befall you. Guard against it. Begin systematic saving while you are young, so that when you are old you will at least have the comfort of being independent.

Are you laying up affection for your old age? Most of us have a curious and naïve belief in what we call “natural affection.” We befool ourselves into thinking that people must love us because they stand in a certain relationship to us and because there are blood ties between us. Never was there a more fallacious theory. There is, to be sure, the mother’s passion for the child she has borne and the instinctive clinging of the child to its mother while it is young and helpless, but that is all. It doesn’t follow as a matter of course that grown-up men and women love their parents just because they are their parents. As a matter of fact, they don’t, unless the father and mother have won their love by years of tenderness and understanding and sympathy. You can’t be hard and tyrannical and selfish and stingy with your children and expect them to love you because it is their duty to do so. If you want your children to love you when you are old, you have to begin winning their hearts when they are in the cradle.

Have you laid up a good supply of friendship for your old age? No complaint is heard more often from the old than that they are lonely. Few come to see them. They are seldom asked out. No one sends them flowers when they are sick. They are neglected and they crave the little attentions that we all like and yearn for the society of their fellow creatures. Now, when old people are lonely, it is always their own fault. It is because they have neglected to lay up any friendships for the sere and yellow days when they have no longer the power to attract people to them.

They have gone their selfish way through life, sufficient unto themselves in their youth. They have never held out a helping hand to those in need. They have never wept with those who wept and rejoiced with those who rejoiced. They have not bothered to write notes of condolence or congratulation. They have never visited the sick and afflicted. They have never spent an hour listening to an old person’s garrulous talk, and so, when they get old, they are repaid in the same coin.

Are you laying up any mental riches for your old age? I know an old lady so feeble that she cannot stir from her chair, and whose eyes have failed so that she cannot tell day from night, and who is so deaf that she cannot be read to, but who passes her days delightfully reciting to herself whole cantos of Scott and Byron and recalling word for word chapters of Dickens and Thackeray and Miss Austen. Her mind to her a kingdom is, in which she finds entertainment and amusement. Will you be amused or bored when you are in your nineties and have nothing but your own society? I know another woman, middle-aged, who is deliberately laying up a treasure of memories of travel to solace her in her old age. She will never know a dull moment, for she will have something to think about besides her rheumatism and her diet when she sits alone in the twilight of life.

Old age comes to us all. Don’t let it find you empty-handed or empty-minded. Thus shall you make it a time of happiness instead of torment.

The Blue Book of Social Usage—

Etiquette

In Society, In Business, In Politics, and At Home

By EMILY POST

“The most complete book on social usage that ever grew between two covers.” There are 24 pages about introductions and greetings, 7 about street conduct, 13 on conduct at the theatre, 10 on conversation, 25 on cards and visits, 33 on invitations, 12 on teas, 61 on dinners, 12 on breakfasts and suppers, 26 on balls and dances, 12 on “the debutante,” 12 on matrimonial engagements, 33 on preparations for the wedding, 35 on “the day of the wedding,” 23 on funerals, 58 on letters, 22 on dress, 9 on the clothes of a gentleman, 34 on the well-appointed house, 24 on traveling at home and abroad.

The author is a shining figure in society and her charming and popular book is accepted everywhere as the authoritative Blue Book of Social Usage. Illustrated.

Crown 8vo, Cloth. 639 pages. $4, net; flexible leather, $7.50, net; postage, 18c extra.

The Blue Book of Personal Attire—

How to Dress Well

A valuable treatise by an authority which considers dress for women from both the artistic and the practical view-points, and provides sound information on the principles of tasteful and attractive apparel. Not only does this book give details for enhancing one’s personal appearance, for slenderizing the stout, for broadening the slender, for the selection of headwear and other accessories, but also practical guidance for the selection and testing of materials, choosing of laces and furs, budgeting the dress allowance, and for the care and up keep of the wardrobe. It is brimful of the very information pertaining to dress, color, and toilet accessories about which every woman hesitates to accept any but truly trustworthy advice and is a fitting companion to Emily Post’s “Etiquette.” Modistes, designers, dressmakers, and milliners will also find this work of highest value. Illustrated.

8vo, Cloth. 494 pages. $3.50, net; postage, 18c extra.

The Blue Book of Cookery And Manual of House Management

By ISABEL COTTON SMITH

With an Introduction by Emily Post, Author of “Etiquette”

This is not “just another cookbook,” but an original and authoritative guide for the preparation of foods and for house management. All the originality and importance of this volume would be of limited value unless it were written by so capable and practical an authority as Isabel Cotton Smith. It contains more than 2,000 recipes; gives complete information on the management of house and home, with invaluable suggestions for table economy, and includes everything for every season and every day in the year, for every possible repast from breakfast to late supper and from teas and picnic meals to specially designed menus for children at home and at school, as well as menus for vegetarians.