“At Your Age,” a relatively unknown 1929 short story published in the Saturday Evening Post, contains all the trademark elements that F. Scott Fitzgerald's readers had come to expect by the end of the Jazz Age: there is a handsome, sympathetic hero embarrassed by his conventional, middle-class background; an irrepressible flapper whose flamboyant petulance symbolizes the frivolity of youth; a contemptuous, vain rival who steals the girl away with a flashy car; a doting, dull mother flummoxed by her daughter's anti-traditionalism; and even talk of petting parties, those scandalous teenage necking extravaganzas that This Side of Paradise first brought to public attention nearly a decade earlier. And yet “At Your Age” departs from the familiar Fitzgerald formula in at least one significant way. Unlike Amory Blaine, Dexter Green, or Jay Gatsby, Tom Squires loses the girl not because he is too poor, but because he is too old. At fifty, Tom is attracted as much to Annie Lorry's age as to her beauty or social status. She is for him a veritable fountain of youth, revivifying memories of “the warm sureties” of his own adolescence and reintroducing him to “the very terminology of young romance” (Price, 288). The pathos of the story arises from Tom's belief that age is a mind set, not a chronological measure. “I am not old,” he assures himself. “At fifty I’m younger than most men of forty” (Price, 278). But when Annie betrays him with a swain thirty years his junior, he is stunned by the foolishness of his Ponce-de-Léon pretensions. Chastising her in a parental tone, he realizes “with a shock that he and her mother were people of the same age looking at a person of another.” By story’s end, Tom resolves to act his age: “He had lost the battle against youth and spring, and with his grief paid the penalty for age’s unforgivable sin – refusing to die” (Price, 291).