pebbles on the beach slide between her fingers. In a word, all the
harshness of her judgments and reflections do not save her from the
dreadful distress of growing old....

In vain she withdraws from the society of her fellow-creatures, in the
hope that old age will no longer have terrors for her when there is no
one at hand to watch her physical decay; the redoubtable phantom still
haunts her in her retreat; watches her, brushes past her, and mocks her
sincere effort to abandon all coquetry and cease "to count as a woman."
At the same time a cruel melancholia 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'mère" in Béranger'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.