To one who cares for the outward form of her body, changes will occur inevitably as the months pass, which may give rise to deep distresses, principally because they feel at the time so permanent and it is difficult to believe that the disfigurements will ever pass. For a time she must inevitably become less and less beautiful; she may indeed become, even to herself, repugnant. Perhaps to her as to so many thousands of women the sight of themselves then is a torment, and the conquest of this feeling is a great and increasingly difficult mental exercise. As this time approaches and is upon her, the young mother-to-be must concentrate all her conscious thought on the beauty of the future. She must forget the present and its cruel distortions and live in the months and years that are to come when she will have with her another life and lovely form to which she has given origin. Nothing is at present gained for our civilization by the obstinate blindness on the part of some, and the wilful deception on the part of others, which together encourage the concealment from the bride of what she has to face. On the one hand stand these prudes, but on the other the too eager and explicit, even lewd and profane and soiled minds who delight in lugubrious warnings. The result has been that many a woman enters upon her motherhood gaily and eagerly, totally unprepared for what is to follow, totally unaware that, by the first act of motherhood, she gives up something essential to herself and something which is irreplacable in all the after years. So great a gift should be made not only voluntarily, but consciously, and with full knowledge of what it entails. Cruel indeed is the callous hardness of the older mind that can see without desiring to help the proud and sensitive young spirit embarking upon a course which cannot but entail subtle difficulties at the best and extreme physical anguish at the worst, yet help of the kind the modern sensitive girl needs is almost unobtainable. Rare indeed is the mother of the last generation who has the power and the knowledge to meet the unvoiced demands of this.