So devitalised and neurasthenic are many of our pretty young girls, that their flowerlike faces, topping over-tall and undeveloped bodies, suggest delicate blossoms crowning long attenuated, sapless stems. Neither faces nor bodies are vitalised and athrill with powers rooted in healthful organs; vivified by healthful functions, and instinct with warm, iron-rich, magnetic blood. They show that making for beauty which is inherent in the Woman-traits, but which, in latter-day girls, owing to defective constitutional vigour or to educational, social or industrial exhaustion, has been able to realise itself only in sickly and weed-like development. Life manifests in these neurotics in the form of vivacities merely; not as vitalities. Severed from their natural roots in Life and vital function, they resemble nothing more than charming cut-blossoms gracefully fading on drawing-room shelves. The truth is that girls brought up on modern strenuous methods skip the years between 16 and 26. If young and fresh at 16, all at once we find them 26 in constitution and in temperament--a little lean, a little lined, a little wan, a little shrill, a little chill, and only too often more than a little disillusioned and cynical--in a word already _passées_. Some are, of course, an interesting and attractive 26, but the fresh, warm, vital and beautiful years from 17 to 27, the years of a natural woman's most charming bloom of mind and body, have dropped from their lives, like petals from roses. So that our girls in their 'teens require to hide the ravages of time by every sort of artifice. And at 26 in years, they are approaching the forties in constitution and temperament; are even keen on politics, cards, finance--resorts, pre-eminently, of materialistic middle-age. This blighting of young womanhood, with loss of youthful bloom and responsiveness, it is that has led to the decadent and demoralising vogue of the Flapper. Since, beyond all things, men seek vital youth and freshness in the other sex, to find it now-a-days, they must seek it in children. VII Deplorable are the degenerative processes by way of which those noble natural characteristics of the Woman-sex which Nature has achieved by ages of evolutionary advance may be observed to lapse, and are presently all but obliterated from the woman form and face.