The lastmentioned class of women most frequently become meager, and lose their freshness during the continuance of these states.
If, however, during these states, suitable precautions and preservative cares be not employed, it is the first class who most suffer from traces of maternity.
Conception, pregnancy, delivery, and suckling, being renewed more or less frequently during the second age, hasten debility in feeble and ill-constituted women; especially if misery or an improper mode of life increase the influence of these causes.
In the third age of woman, extending generally from forty to sixty, the physical form does not suddenly deteriorate; and, as has often been observed, “when premature infirmities or misfortunes, the exercise of an unfavorable profession, or a wrong employment of life, have not hastened old age, women during the third age preserve many of the charms of the preceding one.”
At this period, in well-constituted women, the fat, being absorbed with less activity, is accumulated in the cellular tissue under the skin and elsewhere; and this effaces any wrinkles which might have begun to furrow the skin, rounds the outlines anew, and again restores an air of youth and freshness. Hence, this period is called “the age of return.”
This plumpness, though juvenile lightness and freshness be wanting, sustains the forms, and sometimes confers a majestic air, which, in women otherwise favorably organized, still interests for a number of years.
The shape certainly is no longer so elegant; the articulations have less elasticity; the muscles are more feeble; the movements are less light; and in plump women we observe those broken motions, and in meager ones that stiffness, which mark the walk or the dance at that age.
At this period occurs a remarkable alteration in the organs of voice. Women, therefore, to whom singing is a profession, ought to limit its exercise.
When women pass happily from the third to the fourth age, their constitution, as every one must have observed, changes entirely; it becomes stronger: and nature abandons to individual life all the rest of existence.
Beauty, however, is no more; form and shape have disappeared; the plumpness which supported the reliefs has abandoned them; the sinkings and wrinkles are multiplied; the skin has lost its polish; color and freshness have fled for ever.