The remarkable merit of this book that made it something of a sensation through all western Europe ten years ago is the masterly descriptions of the state of mind of women of a certain type, and perhaps to some extent of all, at the turn of life. While there is not a phrase in it that could shock the most fastidious, it is evident throughout that the author’s soul is permeated with a sex consciousness that finds numberless indirect expressions and that she knows life and man chiefly from this standpoint, condones most of woman’s errors, advises her friends to courses that convention forbids, etc. No one ever began to write such a book, not even Octave Feuillet in his _La Crise_. It all reads like a marvelous confession of things no woman ever said before or could say to a man. She says: Somebody should found a vast and charitable sisterhood for women between forty and fifty, a kind of refuge for the victims of the years of transition, for during that time women would be happier in voluntary exile or at any rate entirely separated from the other sex.... We are all more or less mad, even though we struggle to make others think us sane. There are moments when I envy every living creature who has the right to pair--either from hate or from habit. I am alone and shut out. Women’s doctors may be as clever and sly as they please but they will never learn any of the things women confide to each other. Between the sexes there lies not only a deep, eternal hostility but the involuntary abyss of a complete lack of reciprocal comprehension. It would be better for woman if she walked barefoot over red-hot ploughshares for the pain she would suffer would be slight, indeed, compared to that which she must feel when, with a smile on her lips, she leaves her own youth behind and enters the region of despair we call growing old. It may safely be said that on the whole surface of the earth not one man exists who really knows woman. If a woman took infinite pains to reveal herself to a husband or a lover just as she really is, he would think she was suffering from some incurable mental disease. A few of us indicate our true natures in hysterical outbreaks, fits of bitterness and suspicion, but this involuntary frankness is generally discounted by some subtle deceit. If men suspected what took place in a woman’s inner life after forty, they would avoid us like the plague or knock us in the head like mad dogs.