Now it is precisely from this most important thing of all that the spinster feels herself most radically and hopelessly severed. She may minister to it indirectly, through the factory, the municipal or Government offices, the studio, the nursery or the scientific professions; but her importance will be commensurate with the relation she bears to it. She is one step removed from the main stream, she does not directly flow with it; before the most important thing on earth, the thing that gives everything else its sense, she is and can only be a spectator. This is the additional anguish she must feel as a creature cheated of her proper calling. The artist with whom we have compared her, who suffers the mortifying experience of pursuing a vocation (accountancy) not his own, may after all be flowing with the Stream of Life, and form part of it. The additional anguish of being “out of it,” in this sense, he need not necessarily feel. He experiences only half the spinster’s spiritual distress. Nor will it necessarily console her, or reconcile her to her relatively unimportant fate as spectator, to point to the pain, the passion, the disappointment, the hardships, the disease and the poverty that lash the main Stream of Life like a flail. If she is honest, she will tell you just what everybody else feels—that she would risk all these things to be in it. But there is yet something more she endures, which the artist doomed to accountancy is spared. Provided he be wise and observes the essential rules of hygiene and sound diet, there is no reason, despite his abandoned mission, why his body should suffer very severely. While he may deplore his wasted capacity for art, he may nevertheless live a healthy sexual life and become a happy father. The positive spinster, on the other hand, cannot well escape the physical penalty of her total sexual abstinence. The rebuff offered to her reproductive system by the long, endless wait is neither passed over by Nature nor forgiven. Such elaborate preparations as have been made in her body for a specific consummation cannot end in nothing, without certain very definite reactions, which it is neither fanciful nor fantastic, but rather helpful, to describe collectively as a profound _physiological disappointment_. The fact that this physiological disappointment does not enter consciousness as a disappointment has nothing whatever to do with its reality.