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1 " He watched his former schoolmates as they flocked in now, boisterously, each one with a noisy greeting. They were the same people. He could recognize them, in spite of their disguises of modern garments. Yet they seemed to have changed indefinably, to have coarsened and cheapened themselves, to have grown brazen and hard. It wasn’t just that they were older—the make-up of the girls had hidden age to a certain extent—it was that they seemed to have lost illusions, to be without that eager look of youth with its natural hopefulness. They were not old enough to have lost those things. It was almost as if they had lost joy or all hope of it. He had seen that look on men and women of the world, but these who had lived in the home town and grown up with him, these ought not to have it, not yet anyway—not so soon. Why, in some cases it almost seemed as if they were wildly unhappy and were trying to keep the world from finding it out, as if their very laughter were hollow with pain! "
― Grace Livingston Hill , Daphne Deane