If one rejects this statement let him look about among his acquaintance at the men who have toiled hard to achieve an independence, and whose wives have toiled with them, either because they lived in communities where it was impossible to keep servants, or out of a mistaken sense of economy.  The man looks fresh and his wife elderly and wrinkled and shapeless, even if she has reasonable health.  It is quite different in real cities where life on a decent income (or salary) can be made very easy for the woman, as I have just pointed out; but I have noticed that in small towns or on the farm, even now, when these scattered families are no longer isolated as in the days when farmers’ wives committed suicide or intoxicated themselves on tea leaves, the woman always looks far older than the man if “she has done her own work” during all the years of her youth and maturity.  If she renounces housekeeping in disgust occasionally and moves to an hotel, she soon amazes her friends by looking ten years younger; and if her husband makes enough money to move to a city large enough to minimize the burdens of housekeeping and offer a reasonable amount of distraction, she recovers a certain measure of her youth, although still far from being at forty or fifty what she would have been if her earlier years had been relieved of all but the strains which Nature imposes upon every woman from princess to peasant.

It remains to be seen whether the extraordinary amount of work the European women are doing in the service of their country, and the marked improvement in their health and physique, marks a stride forward in the physical development of the sex, being the result of latent possibilities never drawn upon before, or is merely the result of will power and exaltation, and bound to exhibit its definite limit as soon as the necessity is withdrawn.  The fact, of course, remains that the women of the farms and lower classes generally in France are almost painfully plain, and look hard and weather-beaten long before they are thirty, while the higher you mount the social scale in your researches the more the women of France, possessing little orthodox beauty, manage, with a combination of style, charm, sophistication, and grooming, to produce the effect not only of beauty but of a unique standard that makes the beauties of other nations commonplace by comparison.

Nevertheless, the fact remains that these girls and young women working in the Usines de Guerre, are better looking than they were before and shine with health.  The whole point, I fancy, lies in the fact that they work under merciful masters and conditions.  If they were used beyond their capacity they would look like their sisters on the farms, upon whom fathers and husbands have little mercy.