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 Now to tell you the truth—didn't I say I was always candid?—I had just about that time begun to think that a little absence on my part would not be at all a bad thing. You see, it was like this. I was a bit down on my luck just then. I was near about celebrating, or rather trying to hush up as close as an affectionate family would let me, another of those annually recurring nuisances—a birthday, and I was beginning to feel that the time was coming when vulgar-minded people would be talking of me as no 'chicken,' 'getting on,' 'long in the tooth,' 'not so young as she was,' or 'never see this side of thirty again.' Now, no woman can look on calmly and hear herself called things like that. It isn't in the blood. Of course it takes different women different ways. Some descend to charity and the curate straight away. Others hang on and get resigned, while others again take to art and make an uphill fight of it. Now I was still enough of a 'chicken' not to have come to the parting of the ways as yet. But I could see them looming on ahead, and I recognised now that the only chance of escape was by the help of man. But that was just where the difficulty lay. It wasn't that there was any lack of men. I had had at least half a dozen proposals every year for the last—but no, I won't say how many years. It's a mistake to be too candid about a thing like that. One must retain a little reticence somewhere. The fact was that men who proposed, or tried to propose, had long since bored me. It's all very well up to a certain point, but I had got to that stage now that