"Yes?"

"Or I might call it depression, melancholy, in fact. Now I don't want--I
simply will not be the victim of depression, as so many women are. Do
you realise how frightfully women--many women--suffer secretly from
depression when they--when they begin to find out that they are not
going to remain eternally young?"

"I realize it, certainly."

"I will not be the victim of that depression, because it ruins one's
appearance and destroys one's power. I am thirty-eight."

Her large blue eyes met the Doctor's eyes steadily.

"Yes?"

"In England nowadays that isn't considered anything. In England, if one
has perfect health, one may pass for a charming and attractive woman
till one is at least fifty, or even more. But to seem young when one is
getting on, one must feel young. Now, I no longer feel young. I am
positive feeling young is a question of physical health. I believe
almost everything one feels is a question of physical health. Mystics,
people who believe in metempsychosis, in the progress upward and
immortality of the soul, idealists--they would cry out against me as a
rank materialist. But you are a doctor, and know the empire of the body.
Am I not right? Isn't almost everything one feels an emanation from
one's molecules, or whatever they are called? Isn't it an echo of the
chorus of one's atoms?"