Increasingly the curves straighten; the conflict between straight lines and curves occasioning wrinkles. The jaw squares. The lips lose womanly fullness, sweetness, and their natural colour and texture of rose-leaves; becoming thin and pale and stern. Shadows gather round them, foreshadowing, it may be, a masculine growth of hair. Hair loses lustre and grows sparse, particularly above the brows. The chin loses its feminine softness; rigidity and grimness being substituted. Eyes lose fullness, tenderness, brilliance, and woman's normal melting expression. The glance grows chill, hard, shrewd, direct. Crowsfeet mar the modelled lids. The serene, inspiring woman-brows are furrowed by the permanent frown of eye-strain or of nervous tension. The voice falls flat and metallic, or drops into gruffness and harshness; losing its delicate tuneful inflections, its sympathetic timbre, its joyous quality. The cheeks hollow; the white temples are wrecked. In the faces of women whose systems are functioning healthfully, a number of exquisite artistries in cellular texture of skin and in tinting appear; the skin beneath the eyes differing from that of the cheeks, that of the brows differing from that of the chin, that above the mouth from that below, and so forth. In women subjected to constitutional strain, all these exquisite artistic differentiations--product of incalculable evolutionary developments--are obliterated; the skin over the whole face becoming of the same grain and hue, as is normal to the male. The body becomes spare and sinewy, or set and spread; its movements heavy and abrupt. And more and more the hidden male emerges from the wreckage. The male right arm, swinging like a pendulum, suggests itself as being the motive-power of the ungraceful mechanism. With the increasing maleness of physique, male mental proclivities develop; obsessions to wear trousers, to smoke, to stride, to kill, and otherwise to indulge the masculine bent. * * * * * It may be objected that Beauty takes too high a place in the counsels of this book. _Beauty is Normality_, however. Nature, in her every aim and handiwork, makes beyond every other thing for grace. Weed and moth, shell and beetle, humming-bird and dragon-fly--all are lovely in technique and artistry. Plainness and uncouthness in humans only too often belie noble mind or disposition. This results, however, from such failure of vital resources that the individual had fine material only to equip his mind, and none left over to adorn his body. One sees the converse too, where all the available potential of beauty has been lavished on handsome exteriors.