In the medical literature on the menopause (Kisch, who studied 96 cases; Laudet, 95; Tilt, Faye, and Mayer, 97 each; and especially the more philosophical Börner and Currier) we find very little save records of physiological and anatomical changes, so that it has remained for the Freudians to exploit the perhaps far more important psychic changes that characterize this stage of life. The love life in the new and larger sense in which this is now coming to be understood is the very heart and core of woman’s nature and it plays a vaster rôle in the life of man than had till lately been suspected. Whatever thwarts or diverts the _vita sexualis_ from its normal course brings all kinds of disasters in its train. About all the transformations of senescence root in the fact that by this recession of the life tide we are gradually cut loose from the more vital currents of the life of the race and individuality now has its unique innings. The debauchee, who marries perhaps late and after long experience with women of easy virtue, often finds a modest wife disappointing and misses all the arts of allurement he had found in his orgies. So, too, when the happily married man finds the earlier ardors of his wife growing cool, he is only too liable to suspect waning affection, when in fact nature is only following her inexorable course. He may even wonder if, in the inscrutable ways Eros has, his wife’s fancy may have unconsciously strayed to some more engaging man or fallen a victim to some baseless suspicion of him, or at any rate grown weary of his advances and perhaps come to a new and deeper realization of some of his faults or limitations. Feeling that their present relations are not all they once were, he fails to recognize that it is the very nature of love to grow sublimated as years pass and to become more and more an affair of the soul, as it perhaps once was of the body; and that it is just at this critical point that it normally becomes richer, riper, and more truly devoted. The wife’s impulse to minister disinterestedly to her husband is never so strong or pure as at the moment when the power of giving complete physical satisfaction first begins to wane and it is at this epoch that it can so easily and naturally be transmuted into the impulse to serve, help, enter into closer and more sympathetic mental relations, to know more of his inner life, struggles, ideals, ambitions and even his business and in general to enlarge the surface of personal contact. This is thus the psychological moment for man to interest his mate in the affairs he has most at heart and to make her a partner, perhaps even of some of the details, of his own vocation. This golden opportunity, however, is brief, and if it passes unimproved it will soon be forever too late and each mate will, ere long, find him- or herself starting on devious ways that will lead them ever further apart.