king 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
industrious and observant interests studies stenography and
type-writing, moves to the vicinity of offices, but is then caught up in
the life of a farmer-husband who shifts her center of activity to a farm
in Idaho where she must devote herself to entirely different activities,
form new associations, think in new terms, respond to new emotions, and
adjust herself to her farmer-husband's personality. When, after
twenty-five years, she has reared a family of children, and when
improved circumstances enable them to move up to the county seat, she
confronts many of the conditions for which she originally prepared
herself, but with farm habits, diminishing adaptability and diminishing
power of appealing to her husband. His powers are still comparatively
unimpaired, and as a dealer in farm produce or farm machinery his
interests undergo slight change. In general, it may be said that a
woman's life falls into three great periods of twenty-five years each.
The first twenty-five years of childhood and girlhood is a time of
getting ready for the puzzling combination of her personal needs as a
human being, her needs as a self-supporting social unit, and her
probabilities of matrimony. The second twenty-five years, the domestic
period of her life, is a time of adjustments as wife and mother, which
may instead prove to be a period of barren waiting, or a time of
professional and industrial self-direction and self-support. The third
twenty-five years is a time of mature and ripened powers, of lessened
romantic interests, and if the preceding pe