But, after all, what is to be Miss Singleton’s ultimate aim in life? She cannot fill her whole existence with dances, tennis, and flirtations, for time will have something serious to say on that subject. Say she is five-and-thirty now; in another five years she will have leisure from her present pastimes to realise her want of new interests. She may not personally feel that age is creeping on apace, but she will be made sensible of the fact by all kinds of external signs. She will find that, though the marriages of her brothers and sisters, and other contemporaries of her girlhood, at first made little difference in their attitude towards her, the increasing and growing-up of their families make a very great difference, and, naturally, the interest that is taken in herself must under these conditions become gradually lessened. A new generation of girls will have ousted her from the arena of flirtation, for the spinster of forty stands but little chance against the girl of twenty, though her wit be twenty times as great, and her charms be all the more telling for long practice. And then her interests will become narrower as her field of interest is reduced in dimensions by the encroachments of time and its consequences, until an utter sense of loneliness and uncaredforness sets in, and then—God help her! But I would let Miss Singleton’s story point a moral for all spinsters. Because one man gave her a bitter draught to swallow, she allowed herself to believe, until too late, that there was no more sweetness in the world; because one man proved false, she withdrew her faith from all men; and so she has missed the blessings of domestic love, the wife’s happiness, the mother’s joys, and so some good man has missed a good wife. _THE INDIVIDUAL WOMAN_