definitely eleven, she recognized the necessity of dropping such pretense
even with herself. They were just chairs, she rerepeated; there was an
end of that.

The tall clock with the brass face outside her door, after a
premonitory whirring, loudly and firmly struck seven, and Laurel
wondered whether her sisters, in the room open from hers, were awake.
She listened attentively but there was no sound of movement. She made a
noise in her throat, that might at once have appeared accidental and
been successful in its purpose of arousing them; but there was no
response. She would have gone in and frankly waked Janet, who was not
yet thirteen and reasonable; but experience had shown her that Camilla,
reposing in the eminence and security of two years more, would permit no
such light freedom with her slumbers.

Sidsall, who had been given a big room for herself on the other side of
their parents, would greet anyone cheerfully no matter how tightly she
might have been asleep. And Sidsall, the oldest of them all, was nearly
sixteen and had stayed for part of their cousin Lucy Saltonstone's dance,
where no less a person than Roger Brevard had asked her for a quadrille.

Laurel's thoughts grew so active that she was unable to remain any
longer in bed; she freed herself from the enveloping linen and crossed
the room to a window through which the sun was pouring in a sharp bright
angle. She had never known the world to smell so delightful--it was one
of the notable Mays in which the lilacs blossomed--and she stood
responding with a sparkling life to the brilliant scented morning, the
honey-sweet perfume of the lilacs mingled with the faintly pungent odor
of box wet with dew.