But it is inconceivable how old a young woman is at twenty-one who has begun life at sixteen in this tremendous way. Kate, who had been for five long years thus about the world--at all the balls, at all the pleasure-parties, at all the races, regattas, cricket-matches, flower-shows, every kind of country entertainment--and at everything she could attain to in town in the short season which her father could afford to give them--felt herself about a hundred when she attained her majority. She had done absolutely everything that can be done in the way of amusement--at least in England--and the last Winter and Spring had been devoted to doing the same sort of thing “abroad.” There was nothing new under the sun to this unfortunate young woman--unless, perhaps, it might be getting married, which had for some time begun to appear a worthy object in her eyes. To make a good match and gain a legitimate footing in the society to which Dropmore, etc., belonged; to be able to give “a good setting down” to the unapproachable women who ignored her from its heights--and to snatch the delights of a title by sheer strength and skill from among her hurly-burly of Guardsmen, this had begun to seem to Kate the thing most worth thinking of in the world. It was “full time” she should take some such step, for she was old, blasée, beginning to fear that she must be passée too,--at one and twenty! Nineteen at the outside is the age at which the rampant girl ought to marry in order to carry out her career without a cloud--the marriage, of course, bien entendu, being of an appropriate kind.