The Life-tax levied on the male is incomparably less, however, than that exacted of the female.
IV
It is because of their anabolic mode of tissue-cells, less wasteful upon the material plane, that girls and women normally require less food than boys and men do. Notwithstanding that their bodies are more highly nourished than are those of males. Healthy young women continue to be plump and pretty, healthful and active on bread-and-butter, fruits and sweetmeats. While mannish women, whose physiology has deteriorated to the katabolic, disruptive and forceful, male mode, possess frequently the hungry appetites of men; not only for food but for drink. And yet withal, they are lean and for the most part plain, and poorly nourished.
With the wane in her of the anabolic mode of cellular conservation, and the release thereby of vital resources which, sealed up in her tissue-cells at adolescence, remain invested in organisation during her years of possible motherhood, woman in whom sex is not highly developed reverts more or less (as does the constitutionally-deteriorated oyster) to the masculine type. She lapses to a katabolic metabolism.
At middle-age, accordingly, provided she be still healthy, she derives a considerable accession of energy, physical and intellectual. Now for the first time relieved of the Life-tax upon her resources, her powers are released from bond, and become more fully available for individuation and personal activity.
At the same time, with this conversion of constitutional investment to the form of current and available energy, there occurs a proportional—sometimes a very signal—impoverishment of organisation; and, after a phase of recrudescent emotionalism, a cooling and thinning of passional feeling. Because such realisation of invested vital capital is inevitably the precursor of decline. Thenceforward her cells, no longer sustaining their high evolutionary states, generate more of concrete energy, and endow her with increased powers of action. But their conditional deterioration is manifest in general deterioration of physique, of looks, and frequently of health.
Not seldom, indeed, when her constitutional reserves had been previously depleted by over-expenditure, physical or mental, the cell-deterioration of this epoch lapses to serious disease or disability; to rheumatism, gout, cancer or other perverted forms.
With the constitutional and biological changes come psychical changes too. In women in whom sex is not highly-specialised, middle-age entails, with its quasi-masculine physical phase, quasi-masculine mental traits. They may become strenuous and combative, sometimes difficult and domineering. Perhaps they attach themselves to political and ethical "anti"-movements, as arena for their new combativeness, their augmented intellection, and increased physical activity.
In the most womanly of women also (as in men at a later epoch) there occurs at this period a natural transposition of the parental traits of Altruism and Chivalry to the impersonal plane; moving them to mother and father the world in general, by way of Charity, Philanthropy, Reform.
V