For any woman, maid or matron, past youth, who hears the leaves begin to drop, and sees the roses curl in the warm summer of her life, this chapter is written. It is well that with the decay of bloom and outward charm there should be a lessening of feeling, an amiable indifference to the homage that youth covets eagerly. The woman of--who dares fill in the age?--the woman who finds the faint lines on her cheek and the pallor creeping to her lip should have learned and tasted many things in her life--so many that she can appraise the value of all, and resign them contentedly, with a little sigh, not for what they were, but for what they were not. She should have loved, and, if possible, have won love in return, though that is less matter. The wisdom, the blessedness, come through loving, not through being loved. It is well if she can accept the complement of her affection, and find out of what mutable elements it is made: its fervor and forgetfulness; its devotion, often eclipsed and as often surprising with its fresh strength--weak where we trust it most, and standing proof where we surely expect it to fail. Such is the love of man. It is a riddle, whose learning has cost gray hairs on tender temples, the roses from many cheeks. It is the tradition that love makes or mars a woman’s life; but I have yet to learn that it does not exert an equal though silent power over the lot of men. Be that as it may, a woman in love is far more beautiful than one out of it. And this is true if the love last to threescore. Let women, if they would remain charming, by all means keep their hold on love, their faith in romance. The power of feeling gives vitality and interest to faces long after their first flush has passed. Speaking as matter of fact, this is the case, for emotion has a livelier power than the sun has over the blood, and the miracle of love in making a plain girl pretty is explained by the stimulating effects of happiness on the circulation. If you would preserve inspiration in your looks, beware how you repress emotion. Cultivate, not the signs of it, but emotion itself, for the two things are very distinct. Suffer yourself to be touched and swayed by noble music and passion. To do this, place yourself often under the best influences within reach. There may be pathos enough in the rendering of a poor little girl’s song at the piano to stir tenderly chords of feeling that were growing dull for want of use. The rose of morning, the perfume of spring, have rapt many a middle-aged woman away to divine regions of fancy, from which she came back with their dewy freshness and smell lingering about her. Youth has its daylong reveries while its hands are at work. We older ones need to reserve with jealous care our hours of solitude, in which the springs fill up.