The nobler and more perfect a thing is, the later and slower it is becoming mature. A man reaches the mature (1)_____ of his reasoning powers and mental faculties (2)_____ before the age of twenty-eight; a woman at eighteen. And then, too, in the case of woman, it is the only reason of a sort—very mean in its (3)_____. That is why women remain children their whole life long; never seeing (4)_____ but what is quite close to them, (5)_____ fast to the present moment, taking appearance for (6)_____, and preferring (7)_____ to matters of the first importance. For it is (8)_____ his reasoning faculty that man does not live in the present only, (9)_____ the brute, but looks about him and considers the past anti the future; and this is the origin of (10)_____, as well as that of care and anxiety which so many people (11)_____. Both the advantages and the disadvantages, which this (12)_____, are (13)_____ in by the woman to a smaller extent because of her weaker power of reasoning. She may, in fact, be described as intellectually shortsighted, (14)_____, while she has an immediate understanding of what lies quite close to her, her field of (15)_____ is narrow and does not reach to what is (16)_____; so that things which are absent, or past, or to come, have much less effect upon women than upon men. This is the reason why women are inclined to be (17)_____ and sometimes carry their desire to a (18)_____ that borders upon madness. In their hearts, women think it is men"s business to earn money and theirs to spend it—if possible during their husband"s life, (19)_____, at any rate, after his death. The very fact that their husband hands them (20)_____ his earnings for purposes of housekeeping strengthens them in this belief.