sun governed the heart and nerves, Jupiter the liver, and Venus the rest of the organism; but they were superior to it in so far as they drew no conclusion from it, making hygiene their chief aim, and limiting their ambition to the preservation of health and youthfulness. In this respect they were successful; women have rarely been known to retain their beauty in so much freshness up to an advanced age as these women of the first years of the sixteenth century. Their activity was unceasing, they drank deep of life, but never to excess: therein lay their great secret—a secret that was simplicity itself, and of inestimable value, as the next generation was to find when, by dint of defying nature, by crushing themselves under busks and baubles, exposing the bosom, turning night into day, or carrying everything to extremes, the world became peopled with pale-faced, forbidding, white-lipped women. Ere long a cruel procession of maladies appeared—nervous attacks, fits of hysteria, stabbing pains at the heart, agonising births of puny creatures—signalising the return of neurasthenia, which had seemed buried, but which was to revive in triumph, and for which no other remedies were to be found than a return to the life of nature, fresh air, repose, renunciation of the habits of the fashionable world, uninterrupted vegetation. In brief, the woman whom marriage has started upon a physiological career is bent on defending her body and remaining her own mistress, in face of her husband, her physician—the whole world. She has her work cut out for her. Further, she is beset under various forms by an irruption of materialities, which would speedily overwhelm her if she did not know how to cope with them. She has still to govern the household, to regulate day by day its eating, drinking, sleeping—the whole domestic organisation. Husbands are all alike; it is in great measure to secure a house which “goes like clockwork,” that they marry. They consider it the most natural thing in the world for a woman to consecrate herself to rounding off their life, to yoke herself in unmurmuring submission to thankless tasks, like the domestic drudge described by Solomon, necessary to the world as food or light: “She seeketh wool and flax, and worketh willingly with her hands.... She riseth also while it is yet night, and giveth meat to her household and a portion to her maidens.... She girdeth her loins with strength.... Strength and honour are her clothing.... Favour is deceitful and beauty is vain, but a woman that feareth the Lord, she shall be praised.”