I longed to be thirteen. The being able to write my age with two
figures had not, after all, shed any special lustre upon life; but
when I was 'in my teens' it must 'feel different somehow.' So I
thought. Moreover, this birthday was really to bring with it solid
advantages. I was now to be allowed to read certain books of a more
grown-up character than I had read hitherto, and to sit up till nine
o'clock. I was to wear sandals to my shoes. My hair was henceforth to
grow as long as I and the Fates would permit, and the skirts of my
frocks were to take an inch in the same direction. 'In four more
years,' I said to Fatima, as we sat on the eve of my birthday,
discussing its manifold advantages, 'in four more years I shall be
grown up. Miss Ansted was introduced at seventeen.' The prospect was
illimitable.

"'Do people always grow much on their birthdays?' asked one of the
little ones. I had boasted in the nursery, that when I was thirteen I
should be 'nearly grown up,' and I myself had hardly outlived the idea
that on one's birthday one was a year older than on the previous day,
and might naturally expect to have made a year's growth during the
night.

"This birthday, however, produced no such striking change. As usual,
the presents were charming; the wreath as lovely as Fatima's deft
fingers could make it, the general holiday and pleasure-making almost
too much of a good thing. Otherwise, there was little to mark it from
other days in the year.

"Towards evening we were all sitting on the grass, the boys with their
heads on the sisters' laps, and there had been an outcry for a story,
to which no one had responded; partly, perhaps, because the exquisite