st voyage, under circumstances not discreditable to him. The
next act shows her thirty years later when, as an elderly spinster,
she is passing through the climacteric, and is in the state of sexual
hyperesthesia some women are afflicted with before the menopause. It
is as if the ovaries and the accessory sex internal secretions erupt
into a sort of final geyser before they are exhausted. So the captain,
ever faithful, finds her, and discovers to his horror that she is a
thousand times more like other women than he has ever been like other
men. Because of his ignorance of the underlying chemical basis for
the transfiguration, tragedy follows. Critics may cackle about a sex
starved woman, who has repressed her natural desires, and hail the
play as a contribution to the Freudian clinics. As a matter of fact,
it is a study of libido variation, with endocrine variation, at two
stages of the inner chemical life of a woman.

The chain of events at the menopause, the acme and then ebb of the sex
tide, may be summed up something like this:

The ovaries cease producing their eggs and so shrivel as a storage
battery atrophies when it dries up. An important member of the
endocrine board of directors thus drops out, and so a rearrangement
of gland activities, a new regime, becomes necessary. If a balance
of power is established quickly and equitably, very little happens.
Quickly the woman passes on to the next plane of her existence. But
if some endocrine proves recalcitrant, and takes advantage of the
situation to make itself dominant, trouble and maladjustment, and
their psychic echoes, come. Anterior pituitary control will mean
a relative masculinization, with hair on the face and aggressive
attitudes. Post-pituitary most often refuses to settle down, and
expressing its ambition as headaches, flushes, obesity and hysteria,
may cause extreme misery and unhappiness to its possessor. Sooner
or later, if the harmonious equilibrium of the normal life is to be
revived, all the glands must regress, thyroid, pituitary and adrenals.

With the waning of the ovarian function, the thyroid type will also
exhibit its particular flare. If there is thyroid excess the woman
will be excitable and irritable, the thyroid deficient will be
depressed and dull, the thyroid unstable (that is swinging between
excess and deficiency) will have a cyclic up and down alternation of
mood and temperament. The adrenal centered will have a high blood
pressure