One reason why treatises on the climacteric are so few and so inadequate is that the importance of the subject has only lately been recognized even by psychiatrists, gynecologists, or gerontologists; while another and more important reason is found in the extreme reluctance of the old to tell. Psychoanalysis is impossible unless it can overcome resistance, which it is often put to its wit’s ends to do. Modesty and perhaps prudery have veiled the physiological and, far more, the psychological aspect of this function. This instinct of concealment is no less, and probably far greater, in the old. They balk, evade, and deceive the investigator at every step. Psychoanalysts have strangely neglected this theme and generally even refuse to take patients of over forty or fifty years of age. What can be learned in homes for old men is usually by observation, from attendants and from inmates’ talk of each other, and those who answer questionnaires almost always fail to note facts even remotely related to this theme. Still, in this _terra incognita_ we occasionally come upon the naked truth, only to realize that the retreat of Amor is the counterpart of its advent, as autumn is of springtide. What nature gives so prodigally in pubescent and adolescent years she garners with no less circumstance and no less attention to details, so that we are left, in the end, with no less tendencies to “polymorphic perversity” than before these were constellated into the normal sex life of maturity. Even some of the proclivities to auto-erotism and homosexuality may arise. Amatory reveries may increase as dreams of this character decrease and there are often flashing recrudescences of desire. Despite or after the long and sometimes acute perturbations of the _vita sexualis_ as it draws to its close, there is very commonly a new and deep peace. We are glad that the storm and stress are passed and that we are henceforth immune to passion. This is doubtless the normal and, let us hope, increasingly common course. The sexes approximate each other in both traits and features as they grow old and thus if we can no longer love women sensually, we have a new appreciation of the eternally feminine, its intuitive qualities, and its more general and moral interests. Old women acquire a new power of sensing things from man’s point of view and hence companionship between old men and women may become a noble surrogate for carnal love. Happy the old who can enjoy comradeship on this plane with a congenial member of the other sex and thrice happy is the very rare case of well-mated couples who find, when the time comes, that they have qualified for this consummation of their union with each other!