With the third and final stage, all the symptoms become acute, before dying away completely only to leave the body a mere husk of _unrealised_ and now _undesired_ possibilities. Discontent, unconscious or conscious, together with all kinds of troublesome, though not dangerous, disorders, gradually reduce her body and her spirit, and thus undermine her positiveness. Her temper is irascible; her periods irregular, unreliable and sometimes very painful—the sign that the body is really indignant! Costiveness and leucorrhœa set in chronically. Nobody understands either; nobody cares. The first principles of negativeness begin to creep stealthily into her once positive mind. Her features, hands and arms have lost all their bloom and roundness. With genuine alarm, one day, she suddenly recognizes that she is but a travesty, a caricature, of what she once was; and that Life itself is only a caricature of what it used to be. Now she no longer feels any real physical horror at the thought of spinsterhood, because she is not what she was when spinsterhood would certainly have filled her with horror. If she dislikes the idea of spinsterhood now, it is chiefly owing to her vanity, not to her bodily appetites. She feels that her prestige would be enhanced by the “Mrs.”—that is all! But her body has no share in this vain sentiment. If she has once been the positive girl I describe, however, she is now filled with an indescribable feeling of burning, aching, consuming detestation of the world she once loved. Hope, trust, yea-saying have all gone. Her thwarted instincts manifest themselves in an obverse character, and she becomes misanthropic, purely negative to Man and to Life, and desiring only to end her existence in an act of revenge on man, society and her more fortunate sisters. Only the very positive girl makes a hateful spinster, because only she has lost anything precious, only she knows what a cruel snub her sumptuous preparations once received! To have had all these preparations wasted; to have had to look on while, one by one, her charms grew so faint as no longer even to lure the guest for whom such a rich banquet had once been laid; to have been a magnet and to have watched one’s magnetism gradually vanish without having been effective—these experiences are cruel in any case; but their cruelty increases in proportion to the magnitude, wealth and beauty of the original welcome that Nature had organized. The negative girl, to whom an atonic state of the body, irregular and painful periods, have been an ever-present and familiar condition since her earliest puberty, or the negative girl who, while suffering from none of these disorders, is yet insufficiently vigorous or sound in organic equipment to render the thwarting of her reproductive instinct a state of suffering and bitter disillusionment, may make a perfectly cheerful, engaging, companionable and even thoroughly good-natured old maid.[47]