She was glad that she was too young for that.

She tried to recall the names of all the women who possessed pearls like these, and the apparent though undeclared age of each.

There was not one among them who was under forty.

Most of them had endured many years of married life before acquiring what she was to have at the outset.

Mrs.
Wintermill, for instance: she was sixty-two or three, and had but recently come into a string of pearls not a whit more valuable than the one that now adorned her neck and lay hidden beneath the warm fur collar of her coat.
Her calculations suddenly hit upon something that could be used as a basis.