With a woman, it is quite different. As a girl, the period of puberty
produces profound changes; and after that, for more than thirty years
she passes through periodical exaltations and depressions that must play
a large part in determining her health, happiness and efficiency. In the
forties, comes another great change which affects her life to a degree
strangely ignored by those who have dealt with her possibilities in the
past.[14]

[14] KARIN MICHAËLIS, _The Dangerous Age_, John Lane Co., 1911, is said
to have sold 80,000 in six weeks when it first appeared in Berlin. _The
Bride of the Mistletoe_, by JAMES LANE ALLEN (Macmillan), deals with the
same period.

But the great element of uncertainty, always fronting the girl and young
woman, is marriage. Marriage for her generally means abandonment of old
working interests, and a substitution of new; it brings her geographical
change; new acquaintances and friendships; and the steady adjustment of
her personal life to the man she has married in its relation to
industry, religion, society and the arts. If children come to her, they
must inevitably retire her from public life, for a time, with the danger
of losing connections which comes to all who temporarily drop out of the
race.

A boy, industrious, observant, with some power of administration,
studies mining engineering, moves to a mining center and expresses his
individual and social powers along the lines of his work until he is
sixty. The women who impinge against his life may deflect him from the
mines in California to those in Australia, or from the actual work of
superintendence to an office; or from an interest in Browning to
Tennyson; or from Methodism to Christian Science. The girl with