I saw her on the airplane from Budapest to London. I saw her first from the back, and I thought she must be a girl, around fifteen or sixteen, because she was so small and slender. She walked like a teenager. Then I noticed her bun of gray hair. And when she turned, I realized she was closer to eighty-five than fifteen. She had a small, elegant head with high cheekbones and tan, wrinkled skin, an aquiline nose. And her hair, quite a lot of it, all different shades of gray, was pulled back in the high bun I had seen.

What had deceived me, in part, about her age was that she did not move like an eighty-five year old woman. She stood straight and she moved easily, naturally. Of course I know I’m dealing with stereotypes here — not all women move the same way at any age. But I remember how my grandmother moved at that age, and this woman moved like a yoga instructor, or maybe a former ballet dancer, the kind that becomes a teacher and stands at the front of the ballet class in character shoes, more poised than any of her students. She reminded me of my grandmother, actually. My grandmother had those same high cheekbones, and similarly her cheeks had been hollowed by age, a look that young actresses try to achieve by having the fat sucked from beneath their cheekbones. Be patient, I would tell them. Age will etch your cheeks. Age will make you elegant. My grandmother also had a full head of gray hair, although hers was short all her life.

Like my grandmother, this woman was Hungarian — I know because I heard her talking to a man who might have been a son or son-in-law, and a little girl who was certainly a grandchild, who hung on her hand. She was wearing what I thought was a knit dress until I later saw it in the window of the High Street Kensington Zara and realized it was a sweater-skirt combination, in various shades of gray that matched her hair. Very elegant, and probably expensive. Her shoes had the sort of heels that are more comfortable than flats — medium sized, thick without being chunky, very walkable. And again, elegant.

I noticed all this in the relatively short time I watched her walk onto the plane, then wait in the line to disembark, and then disembark — both times I was behind her. I noticed so much partly because I notice women’s clothes. As they pass on the sidewalk, or as I see them sitting or standing on public transportation, I notice and say to myself, Oh, I like that! What if I tied my scarf the way she’s tying hers? Ok, I see wide legs are in now, and they look good with a long sweater. But could I wear that, at my height (or rather shortness)? Oh, no, not those shoes. She’s going to trip over them any minute . . . It’s not really a way of judging the wearer (although sometimes, to be honest, it’s a way of questioning her judgment). It’s more a way of figuring out what might suit me, who I want to be. At least in the matter of clothes. And of getting new ideas, because I’m not really very creative when it comes to clothes. I mostly know what suits me now, because of all the mistakes I made in the past — years and years of mistakes. We won’t talk about my unfortunate Laura Ashley phase, when I tried very hard to be that romantic boho girl. Or the phase, in graduate school, when I decided to wear only black, day after day. I don’t remember why, but I had just gone back to school after four years as a corporate lawyer, and I think I was in rebellion against all things corporate, against hierarchy and patriarchy (embodied in the very real, non-theoretical hierarchy of partners that I had to work with, some of them gleefully nasty to new associates, both male and female). It was as close as I came to punk, in a Victorian mourning, gothic sort of way.

Anyway, my point is that I noticed this particular woman, not just because she was elegant, but because she was old, as I discovered when she turned around. I could call her elderly, but the point I’m trying to make is that she was eighty-five or so and elegant, and I thought, I’m going to be eighty-five too someday. I’m going to be old, and people are going to call me elderly, and I might say, No, I’m just old, my dear. But there’s no guarantee that I’ll be elegant. But . . . she was. So if she was, I could be too? If, at that age, she could be on a plane from Budapest to London, wearing the latest Zara, I could be too?

I’m not afraid of getting old, but I am afraid of getting old the way my grandmother did, slowly losing her ability to travel, to work at her painting and embroidery. No longer tending her own garden, cooking the recipes in the handwritten recipe book I’ve inherited. The elegant woman, speaking Hungarian to her granddaughter, was a slender beacon of hope.

I still have a while before I’m old, or elderly, or whatever you want to call it. But I’m planning ahead, because I know I’ll get there eventually. (Assuming the politicians with the nuclear buttons don’t blow us all up first, which is always possible.) I suspect the most important element of her elegance was yoga or ballet or pilates, one of those disciplines — whatever it was that allowed her to move so freely. And the second most important element was the absolute comfort of the clothes she was wearing, of her sensible but stylish shoes. It took me a very long time to realize that the pinnacle of elegance is being comfortable in your clothes, your skin — of knowing and being yourself.

I’m not there yet, but in the meantime, I’ll keep admiring elegance, wherever I see it. I was not elegant when I was young, as my high school photos (in which I always looked uncomfortable) amply prove. Now that I’m sort of in the middle, I’m doing my best — no longer quite as awkward, intermittently confident. But really, the goal is to be elegant by the time I’m old, like the woman I saw in the airplane from Budapest to London. Here’s hoping that, by the time I’m eighty-five, I’ll get there.

(The image is Portrait of the Princess de Beaumont by John Singer Sargent.)