The Wichita daily eagle., 1895-01-15
THE ENGAGED GIRL
e Philadelnhia Press.

The ENGAGBO IlfhA
From the Philadelphia Press.
s'She should be labeled: Lass, with
care,'D says the would-be-funny gnat
in .'Aliee in Wonderland" He might
have been speaking of the engaged
girl instead of Alice, so appropriately
does the phrase fit into the common
notions regarding her. Usually to
echo Bunthorne's wall. so, hollow,
hollowp' over our social conventions is
to give battle to windmills powerful
enough to blow Don Quixote, horse,
lance, armor and all, up into the air,
never to come down again; yet when
look on the engagement as it is pop
ulRrly understood, then remember that
we still have some happy marriages, I
End the strongest proof OF Divinity
that shapes our ends, repairs our blum
ders and holds back our misguided feet
from the pit we are wildly anxious to
struggle into. Else what would ever
become of the engaged girl, and that
essential but minor adjunct to the mise
en- scene, the engaged man?
From the moment the ring is seen
sparkling on her hand, the fortunate
unhappy" damsel, the object of her
juniors admiration, her sisters cyni-
cism and her contemporaries blended
pity and envy, is cribbed, cabined and
confined in a set of petty restrictions,
survivals of the unfttest part of bar
barism, if we only knew it. Long ago,
when life was with beautiful simplicity
divided equally between fighting and
courting, public opinion naively as
sumed social intercourse between the
two sexes to have but one end-that of
love-making. The idea, or its remnant,
lasts to-day, under widely different so
cial conditions; consequently Juliet,
from the day she is labeled "Fiancee,
Please Do Not Handle" is not expected
to dance with other men, to receive
them as callers, or to accept reasonable
attentions from them.
So far from mixing with other peo-
pie in society, and thus gaining valu-
able side lights on one another's char
acters, the tdead-to-the-world young
woman and her young man illustrates
La Sales witty saying that ''love is
an egotism of two" by giving up their
evenings to an unlimited solitude
deux, which in a brief engagement is
only to be expected, but in long one
frequently becomes a perfunctory tie
under which Romeo chafes, as in the
case of the young man who broke his
engagement because ''she treated him
like a servant girl-gave him only his
Thursdays and every other Sunday off. "
To the vexed question of long en-
gagements Mr.. Augustine Birrel con-
tributes suggestion in his mild OBJ
servation that tof all the wrongs
women suffer at the hands of men that
of not marrying them is the one they
say should find it easiest to forgive"
This, new and neat variation on the
pins which "have saved a great many
lives by not being swallowed" answers
the common objection to the protract-
ed betrothal. The, matter is self-regu-
1ating; would notqthe man who kept
girl waiting a year month or day
longer than was necessary be still
worse investment as husband than as
fancee? 1t may paradoxically be said
that her loss is her eternal gain.
The same may be said of the much
croaked-over modern tendency to break
engagements which in older times
would have been carried out to the
bitter-often very bitter-end. People
get considerably muddled in talking of
the sacredness of the marriage tie and
that of the engagement tie in the same
breath. They haven't the slightest
connection. An engagement is not, as
many people seem to think, mere
conventional delay to satisfy proprie-
ties and get the trousseau ready, but a
probation during which Romeo and
Juliet test the strength of their affee-
tion before what Rudyard Kipling
grimly calls "the 'long-as-ye- both
shall-live' curse from the altar-rails"
yokes them into q plow,. from which
there is no looking back.
Society has nothing to lose, save pos
sibly pretty spectacle and slice Of
bride cake, that it should so acrimoni-
ously object to peoples pleasing Them
selves in a matter that only concerns
themselves; indeed, they must do so III
it is to give the marriages at which it,
assists by its presence even the brief
guarantee of the cheap jeweler. whose
stock once saw labeled with uncon-l
scious sarcasm:-
Wedding rings, twenty-five cents;
warranted one year"