loneliness that was
theirs before the pervasion of the automobile. Women in city flats are
lonely enough, but although those that have no children or "light
housekeeping" lead such useless lives one wonders why they were born,
they outlast the women of the small towns by many years because of the
minimum strain on their bodies.[G]

[G] The French are far too clever to let the women in the munition
factories injure themselves. They have double, treble, and even
quadruple shifts.

As a matter of fact in the large cities where the struggle of life is
superlative they outlast the men. About the time the children are
grown, the husband, owing to the prolonged and terrific strain in
competing with thousands of men as competent as himself, to keep his
family in comfort, educate his children, pay the interest on his life
insurance policy, often finds that some one of his organs is breaking
down and preparing him for the only rest he will ever find time to
take. Meanwhile his prospective widow (there is, by the way, no nation
in the world so prolific of widows and barren of widowers as the
United States) is preparing to embark on her new career as a club
woman, or, if she foresees the collapse of the family income, of
self-support.

And in nine cases out of ten, if she has the intelligence to make use
of what a combination of average abilities and experience has
developed in her, she succeeds, and permanently; for women do not go
to pieces between forty and fifty as they did in the past. They have
learned too much. Work and multifarious interests distract their mind,
which formerly dwelt upon their failing youth, and when they sadly
composed themselves in the belief that they had given the last of
their vitality to the last of their children; to-day, instead of
sitting down by the fireside and waiting to die, they enter resolutely
upon their second youth, which is, all told, a good deal more
satisfactory than the first.

Every healthy and courageous woman's second vitality is stronger and
more enduring than her first. Not only has her body, assisted by
modern science, settled down into an ordered routine that is
impregnable to anything but accident, but her mind is delivered from
the hopes and fears of the early sex impulses which so often sicken
the cleverest of the younger women both in body and mind, filling the
body with lassitude and the mind either with restless impatience or a
complete indifference to