If and so far as it is true that a woman is as old as she looks and a man as he feels, all this processional, especially its early stages, is, on the whole, probably much harder for her than for him. She feels not only that “the coming of the crow’s foot means the going of the beau’s foot,” but the first wrinkles about the mouth, eyes, or under the chin; the loss of fullness about the neck, to which folklore attributes such significance; the first sagging of the cheeks or the bust; the first signs of fading complexion; or the first gray hair, give her bitter food for thought. Her cult of the mirror, that man progressively eschews, increases. But woman commands far more resources against all such heralds of decay than man and gives vastly more time to compensating for them. Youth is her glory and she has more comeliness to lose than man, who can, however, never quite rival the hag in ugliness. She has also great powers of compensation by affecting girlish ways and has a stronger hold on her youth than man and old women do not feel as old as old men do. Throughout married life, if she is well, woman usually assumes the rôle of the younger mate, even though she be not so in years. Though sexual involution comes to her earlier she remains in far more sympathetic touch with the young than her husband, so that there is a half truth and not mere gallantry in the saying that a woman never grows old. The woman just beginning to feel passé has a psychology all her own of which even the devotees of that science know little and she herself yet less, but of which Michäelis in “The Dangerous Age” has given us a few glimpses. Love, wifehood, and motherhood, as the world knows, constitute the very heart of woman’s life and as the chance of these supreme felicities begins to fade, something, which it is no extravagance to call desperation, begins to supervene. Its processes may and often do deploy so deep in the subconscious regions of the soul that even she is but little aware of the transformations that are taking place there. These she quite commonly ignores, camouflages, or honestly and resentfully denies. The psychopathologist sees most clearly the tragedies of aborted Eros as they are writ large in morbid symptoms. But with the same causes and conditions, the same processes are always more or less active, however repressed, and the unmated woman before the close of the third decennium has generally come to some terms with the death of the phyletic instinct within her, which is the core and mainspring of her life, and has dimly anticipated all the significance of old age.