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 boys; she had been through the experience of perceiving that. With her mother, she had returned to the Maine coast for the past two summers, and had found herself "too old" for the Beach Club dances. A person of fifty, seeing her beside one of the girls who prevailed at these dances, could not have decided which was the elder: to his eye Claire showed not any outward sign at all of her maturity; but the dancing boys knew instantly that she was "too old" for them. Youth has its own divinations; and, for these boys—some of them her own age—Claire was already an "old girl."

"Twenty-five!" she thought, now, biting again upon this sore tooth. Twenty-five would make her an "old girl" indeed; but it should not make her marry. She knew well enough why these women at Mrs. Allyngton's had married these men. Some of them had married in a kind of contagion because they were of the marrying age and because "all the rest" were getting married. Some of them had dallied, then married almost in a panic, grasping at anything as they saw "twenty-five," or worse, approaching; she had been a bridesmaid for "old girls" thus frantically marrying and had shed tears, really of rage, for them.

Angered but vague, she supposed the whole affair