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_