Why do farmers’ wives look so much older than city women of the same age in comfortable circumstances?  Not, we may be sure, because of exposure to the elements, or even the tragic loneliness that was theirs before the pervasion of the automobile.  Women in city flats are lonely enough, but although those that have no children or “light housekeeping” lead such useless lives one wonders why they were born, they outlast the women of the small towns by many years because of the minimum strain on their bodies.[G]

  [G] The French are far too clever to let the women in the munition
      factories injure themselves.  They have double, treble, and even
      quadruple shifts.

As a matter of fact in the large cities where the struggle of life is superlative they outlast the men.  About the time the children are grown, the husband, owing to the prolonged and terrific strain in competing with thousands of men as competent as himself, to keep his family in comfort, educate his children, pay the interest on his life insurance policy, often finds that some one of his organs is breaking down and preparing him for the only rest he will ever find time to take.  Meanwhile his prospective widow (there is, by the way, no nation in the world so prolific of widows and barren of widowers as the United States) is preparing to embark on her new career as a club woman, or, if she foresees the collapse of the family income, of self-support.

And in nine cases out of ten, if she has the intelligence to make use of what a combination of average abilities and experience has developed in her, she succeeds, and permanently; for women do not go to pieces between forty and fifty as they did in the past.  They have learned too much.  Work and multifarious interests distract their mind, which formerly dwelt upon their failing youth, and when they sadly composed themselves in the belief that they had given the last of their vitality to the last of their children; to-day, instead of sitting down by the fireside and waiting to die, they enter resolutely upon their second youth, which is, all told, a good deal more satisfactory than the first.

Every healthy and courageous woman’s second vitality is stronger and more enduring than her first.  Not only has her body, assisted by modern science, settled down into an ordered routine that is impregnable to anything but accident, but her mind is delivered from the hopes and fears of the early sex impulses which so often sicken the cleverest of the younger women both in body and mind, filling the body with lassitude and the mind either with restless impatience or a complete indifference to anything but the tarrying prince.  To blame them for this would be much like cursing Gibraltar for not getting out of the way in a storm.  They are the tools of the race, the chosen mediums of Nature for the perpetuation of her beloved species.  But the fact remains—­that is to say, in the vast majority of girls.  There