Since, however, it is impossible even for Nature herself to stand for ever on the tiptoe of anticipation; since it is too much to expect of anything or anybody, that weariness will not ultimately supervene if a wait is prolonged unduly, or if nothing—aye, nothing!—ever comes to repay an all too lavish outlay of beauty and its promise of joys untasted; it is, alas, a not uncommon occurrence—however ready the girl herself may be to continue waiting and watching—for Nature itself to feel so bitterly snubbed that it withdraws, as it were, from its position of proud and unstinting impresario, and wanders off elsewhere to spread its ornaments and charms over another and perhaps more fortunate subject. This stage in the positive English girl’s career is not apparent to the outsider, nor is it immediately apparent to the girl herself. All she knows is that she does not feel quite as well as she used to feel. She does not sleep so well, eat so well, or resist fatigue so well. She is not conscious, yet, that her looks are no longer so startlingly attractive as they were three or four years ago; but there is a shade of difference of which even she herself is aware on certain days. Her face is beginning to acquire definition. Her features do not melt into one another with the same indefinite sweep of downy cuticle; while the tone has also begun to decline in her bigger organs, and they are losing the braced, tense, healthy readiness they possessed at the beginning of the wait. She may have all kinds of disorders now which she did not have at the moment of her top wave, while a concomitant depression of spirit makes her feel less keen about life, less eager about its mysteries. There is even a threat of anæmia—the result of occasional costiveness, its frequent correlative leucorrhœa, and a general lack of tone in her whole system. A neglected organ avenges itself, a neglected body avenges itself; her whole spirit wishes to avenge itself; for, like a flower, she needed the sun—in her case the sun of love—and she is visibly withering without it.[46]