ng the result of
latent possibilities never drawn upon before, or is merely the result
of will power and exaltation, and bound to exhibit its definite limit
as soon as the necessity is withdrawn. The fact, of course, remains
that the women of the farms and lower classes generally in France are
almost painfully plain, and look hard and weather-beaten long before
they are thirty, while the higher you mount the social scale in your
researches the more the women of France, possessing little orthodox
beauty, manage, with a combination of style, charm, sophistication,
and grooming, to produce the effect not only of beauty but of a unique
standard that makes the beauties of other nations commonplace by
comparison.

Nevertheless, the fact remains that these girls and young women
working in the _Usines de Guerre_, are better looking than they were
before and shine with health. The whole point, I fancy, lies in the
fact that they work under merciful masters and conditions. If they
were used beyond their capacity they would look like their sisters on
the farms, upon whom fathers and husbands have little mercy.

When girls in good circumstances become infected with the microbe of
violent exercise and insist upon walking many miles a day, besides
indulging for hours in games which permit no rest, they look like
hags. Temporarily, of course. When they recover their common sense
they recover their looks, for it is in their power to relax and
recuperate. Men will walk twenty miles, take a cold shower, a good
meal, a night's rest, and look as well as ever the next day--or at the
end of the walk, for that matter. They can afford the waste. Women
cannot. If women succeed in achieving hard unyielding muscles in the
wrong place they suffer atrociously in childbirth; for Nature, who is
as old-fashioned and inhospitable to modern ideas as a Tory statesman,
takes a vicious pleasure in punishing one sex every time it succeeds
in approaching the peculiar level of the other, or which diverges from
the normal in any way. Note how many artists, who are nine-tenths
temperament and one-tenth male, suffer; not only because they are
beset with every sort of weakness that affects their social status,
but because the struggle with life is too much for them unless they
have real men behind them until their output is accepted by the
public, and themselves with it.

Some day Society will be civilized enough to recognize the limitations
and the helplessn