indulge in the ideal conduct which such motives inspire, because the call for it is incessant. This disillusioning weakens the motivation to marriage sometimes on both sides, when girls grow careless in their dress and too negligent in their manners, one of the best schools of woman's morals; and when boys lose all restraints which the presence of girls usually enforces, there is a subtle deterioration. Thus, I believe, although of course it is impossible to prove, that this is one of the factors of a decreasing percentage of marriage among educated young men and women. At eighteen or twenty the girl normally reaches a stage of first maturity when her ideas of life are amazingly keen and true; when, if her body is developed, she can endure a great deal; when she is nearest, perhaps, the ideal of feminine beauty and perfection. Of this we saw illustrations in Chapter VIII. In our environment, however, there is a little danger that this age once well past there will slowly arise a slight sense of aimlessness or lassitude, unrest, uneasiness, as if one were almost unconsciously feeling along the wall for a door to which the key was not at hand. Thus some lose their bloom and, yielding to the great danger of young womanhood, slowly lapse to a anxious state of expectancy, or desire something not within their reach, and so the diathesis of restlessness slowly supervenes. The best thing about college life for girls is, perhaps, that it postpones this incipient disappointment; but it is a little pathetic to me to read, as I have lately done, the class letters of hundreds of girl graduates, out of college one, two, or three years, turning a little to art, music, travel, teaching, charity work, one after the other, or trying to find something to which they can devote themselves, some cause, movement, occupation, where their capacity for altruism and self-sacrifice can find a field. The tension is almost imperceptible, perhaps quite unconscious. It is everywhere overborne by a keen interest in life, by a desire to know the world at first hand, while susceptibilities are at their height. The apple of intelligence has been plucked at perhaps a little too great cost of health. The purely mental has not been quite sufficiently kept back. The girl wishes to know a good deal more of the world and perfect her own personality, and would not marry, although every cell of her body and every unconscious impulse points to just that end. Soon, it may be in five or ten years or more, the complexion of ill health is in these notes, or else life has been adjusted to independence and self-support. Many of these bachelor women are magnificent in mind and body, but they lack wifehood and yet more--motherhood.