Three Score & Ten

Cal demanded, “How old are you?”

“Ten, going on eleven,” said Abra.

“Ho!” said Cal. “We’re eleven, going on twelve.”

Abra pushed her sunbonet back. It framed her head like a halo. She was pretty, with dark hair in two braids. Her little forehead was round and domed, and her brows were level. One day her nose would be sweet and turned up where now it was still button-form. But two features would be with her always. Her chin was firm and her mouth was a sweet as a flower and very wide and pink. Her hazel eyes were sharp and intelligent and completely fearless. She looked straight into the faces of the boys, straight into their eyes, one after the other, and there was no hint of the shyness she had pretended inside the house.

“I don’t believe you’re twins,” she said. “You don’t look alike.”

“We are too,” said Cal.

“We are too,” said Aron.

“Some twins don’t look alike,” Cal insisted.

“Lots of them don’t,” Aron said. “Lee told us how it is. If the lady has one egg, the twins look alike. If she has two eggs, they don’t.”

“We’re two eggs,” said Cal.

Abra smiled with amusement at the myths of these country boys. “Eggs,” she said. “Ho! Eggs.” She didn’t say it loudly or harshly, but Lee’s theory tottered and swayed and then she brought it crashing down. “Which one of you is fried?” she asked. “And which one is poached?”

The boys exchanged uneasy glances. It was their first experience with the inexorable logic of women, which is overwhelming even, or perhaps especially, when it is wrong. This was new to them, exciting and frightening.

John Steinbeck, East of Eden

In fact, Rose was not at the time in question engaged in the love affair which Miss Brodie thought she was, but it seemed so, and Rose was famous for sex. But in her mere eleventh year, on the winter’s walk, Rose had not yet advanced far enough into her prime to speak of sex except by veiled allusion, as when she said of her warrior lover, ‘He was a pure man’, or when she read from James Hogg’s Poem ‘Bonnie Kilmeny’,

‘Kilmeny was as pure as pure could be’

and added, ‘Which is to say, she not go to the glen in order to mix with men.’

Muriel Spark, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie