So far as these remarks are true they afford a new confirmation of my assertions that true Romantic Love is dependent on a certain amount of intellectual power and maturity, and that in consequence man loves more deeply than woman at the age preceding marriage. In England and America novelists still persist in making women love at any age from eighteen, and they have a right to do so, because in these two countries women are well enough educated and experienced in life at eighteen to be able to love. In France girls receive such a superficial education that they are ordinarily quite impervious to any deep emotions before they are either Old Maids or married. But in most cases they are married before twenty without regard to their own wishes. And then happens what is indicated in Fuller’s aphorism: “It is to be feared that they who marry where they do not love, will love where they do not marry.” And hence it is that the only love depicted by French novelists and playwrights is the adulterous love of a faithless wife. Could anything more vividly illustrate the criminal absurdities of French education and the French system of chaperonage? In France a girl is not even allowed to cross the street alone until she is willing to assume the name and with it the comparative freedom of an Old Maid. In Spain, the author of _Cosas de España_ tells us, Old Maids are rare because a girl generally accepts her first offer; and there are probably not many girls who do not receive at least one offer in their life—masculine women always excepted. In Russia, where women, according to Schweiger-Lerchenfeld, enjoy almost as much liberty as in America, a curious custom prevails by which a girl of uncertain age may escape the appellation of Old Maid. She may leave home and become lost for two or three years in Paris, London, or some other howling wilderness of humanity. Then she may return to her friends neither as maid nor wife, but as a widow. And it is “good form” in Russian society to accept this myth without asking for details. Finally the important question remains: “What is an Old Maid?” That depends very much on individuals and the care they take of their Health and Beauty. Some women are Old Maids at twenty, the majority at thirty, and some not before forty; while those girls who will read the chapters on Personal Beauty in the last part of this treatise, and follow all the advice there given, will never become Old Maids at all, but will be gobbled up before twenty-three by eager bachelors previously considered hopeless cases of celibacy. Even if it were possible to name a definite age as that when a girl begins to be an Old Maid, it would be a bit of useless information, because nobody ever knows how old a woman is. Often it is easier to tell a woman’s age by her conversation than by her looks: some incipient Old Maids constantly hint at their former numerous flirtations, which they never did while they really had them.