elancholia possesses her; she feels she has
become old without having profited by her youth. Not that she descends
to the coarse and libertine regrets of "grand'mere" in Beranger's song,
"Ah! que je regrette!" Elsie Lindtner declares more than once that if
she had to start life over again she would be just as irreproachable.
But the nearer she gets to the crisis, the more painfully and lucidly
she perceives the antinomy between two feminine desires: the desire of
moral dignity and the desire of physical enjoyment. In a woman of her
temperament this need of moral dignity becomes increasingly imperious
the more men harass her with their desires--an admirable piece of
observation which I believe to be quite new. Moral resistance becomes
weaker in proportion as the insistent passion of men becomes rarer and
less active. She will end by yielding entirely when men cease to find
her desirable. Then, even the most honourable of women, finding herself
no longer desired, will perhaps lose the sense of her dignity so far as
to send out a despairing appeal to the companion who is fleeing from
her....

Such is the inward conflict which forms the subject of _The Dangerous
Age_. It must be conceded that it lacks neither greatness nor human
interest.

* * * * *

I wish to add a few lines in order to record here an impression which I
experienced while reading the very first pages of _The Dangerous Age_;
an impression that became deeper and clearer when I had closed the book.

_The Dangerous Age_ is one of those rare novels by a woman in which the
writer has not troubled to think from a man's point of view. I lay
stress upon this peculiarity because it is _very rare_, especially among
the contemporary works of Frenchwomen.

The majority of our French authoresses give us novels in which their
ambition to think, to construct and to write in a masculine style is
clearly perceptible. And nothing, I imagine, gives them greater pleasure
than when, thanks to their pseudonyms, their readers actually take them
for men writers.

Therefore all this mass of feminine literature in France, with three or
four exceptions--all this mass of literature of which I am far from
denying the merits--has really told us nothing new about the soul of
woman. A strange result is that not a single woman writer of the present
day is known as a specialist in feminine psychology.

Karin Michaelis has been inspired to write a study