e it."

Jenny was nineteen. The mark of the Orient was not yet visible. A few
roses had withered, but eighteen months of the fusty old theater had
been balanced by laughter outside. There seemed to be no end of her
enjoyment of life. In essentials she was younger than ever. Mrs. Raeburn
worried ceaselessly; but her daughter was perfectly well able to look
after herself. Indeed, the mistakes she made were due to wisdom rather
than folly. She knew too much about men. She had "properly rumbled" men.
She was too much of a cynic to be taken in. Her only ambition was
excitement; and love, in her opinion, did not provide it. She was always
depressed by the sight of lovers. She hated the permanency of emotion
that their perpetual association implied. She and Irene liked to choose
a pair from the group of men who waited by the stage door, as one picks
out two horses for a race. The next evening the pair of last night would
be contemptuously ignored, and a fresh couple dangled at the end of a
string as long as their antics were novel enough to divert.

Jenny still vowed she had no intention of remaining at the Orient, and
if people asked her about her dancing, she mocked.

"What's the good of working? You don't get nothing for it. I _could_
have danced. Yes, once. But now. Well, I can now, only I don't want to.
See? Besides, what's the good?"

If anyone had foretold a career, she would have mocked louder.

"You don't know the Orient; I reckon they don't _want_ to see a girl get
on at the Orient. If you make a success in one ballet, you're crushed in
the next."

One morning Jenny looked at herself in the glass.

"May," she called out, "I think if I was to get old, I'd drown myself.
I would really. Thirty! What a shocking idea!"

"Why, you're only nineteen."

"Yes, I know, but I _shall_ be thirty. Thirty! What an unnatural age!
Who cares? Perhaps I sha'n't never be thirty."

Chapter XII: _Growing Old_

In her twentieth year, when the Covent Garden season of balls was over,
the dread of growing old sometimes affected Jenny. It came upon her in
gusts of premonition and, like a phantom, intruded upon the emptiness of
her mind. The nervous strain of perpetual pleasure had made her restless
and insecure. Day by day she was forced into a still greater dependence
on trivial amusement, notwithstanding that every gratified whim added
the lean ghost of another dread hour to haunt her memory. Headaches
overtook her more e