LIFE COMPANIONSHIP 



Then, again, the practical business side of life should 

 be a governing factor in determining the exact time. 

 The man who enters one of the so-called learned pro- 

 fessions, for example, will generally speaking be longer 

 in placing his feet securely on the financial ladder than 

 the youth who leaves school at an early age to enter a 

 business calling. And it certainly is not conducive to 

 happiness for any one to marry before he has at least a 

 fair prospect of being able to support a wife in a manner 

 decently befitting the station of life to which she has been 

 accustomed. The cynical proverb which declares that 

 when Poverty comes in at the door, Love flies out of the 

 window, has too much warrant in life-experience to be 

 willfully ignored. 



But even for those seemingly favored youth for whom 

 financial problems have been solved in an earlier genera- 

 tion, reasonable delay is to be counseled, before en- 

 tering on the road that has no legitimate turning. 

 The man who did not have a fairly adequate sample of 

 the varied phases of bachelor life, is sure sooner or 

 later to feel that his education was in a measure neglected 

 and to hanker after dangerous experiments to make up 

 the defect at some later period of life. And the woman 

 who did not have the "fling" of a normal girlhood will 

 at times look regretfully upon that stage of her past, 

 and may be prone to indulge a fatal yearning to see the 

 world through the eyes of free maidenhood at an age 

 when the guise no longer becomes her. Human nature 

 is curiously uniform at base, and few of us like to feel 

 that we have missed normal experiences that the gener- 

 ality of our fellows have found alluring. Certainly in 



