The Washington herald., 1921-05-09

am engaged 10 man WHO
makes q comfortable living, but he
u very proud and he does not want
to marry until he can give me a fine
house, and q car and expensive
clothes. i do not want to wait. 1
love him well enough to work for
him and endure poverty with him.
I can't ask him to marry me right
away. when he wants to put the
wedding on. Wont you please do II
for me-
Certainly, my dear.
Haste to the wedding. Mr. Man.
The time to sit down to the banquet
is when the feast Is piping hot, not
afterk everything has grown luke
warm and fiabby and has lost its
flavor You do not realize it now,
but nothing grows stale sooner than
romantic love. Somehow a long en-
gagement loses its pep and ginger.
and when 1t does eventually end in
wedding bells they are not the airy,
fairy bells of dreamland. but the
prosaic dinner bell.
You may ask how a love that gets
its bloom worn of during the few
q years of a betrothal will endure the
long, long years of matrimony. The
two things are entirely difrent.
The glory of an engagement Is its
illusions, but the blessedness OF
marriage is that it hasn't any IL
lusions that it knows you for what
you are, and, in spite of it, loves
you still.
OF course. no man has any right
to marry woman, no matter
whether he is young or old, il he
hasn't some good, reliable way of
providing her with bread ami but
ter and a shelter. II is a criminal
thing for a man to establish a fam
lily and bring children into the
world whom other people have to
support, but it is not necessary for
him to wait until he can provide
his household with cake and limou-
sines before he takes unto himself
a wife
Many men make this mistake.
They put of marrying until they
accumulate fortunes. Sometimes this
is a matter of personal selishness.
Their own individual ease and COM
fort look better to them than any
. woman does. They are not will
ing to give up their good clothes.
their country club, their theaters,
their amusements. as they would
have to do IL the money that en-
ables one to live in luxury had to
be spread over the expenses of a
family
Often, however. q man puts on
marrying until he is middle-aged
because he loves a woman too well to
ask her to face poverty with him.
He is not willing to take her from
her fathers comfortable home to a
humber one. eli cannot bear to
think OF her going shabby for his
sake. or of her soft white hands
growing hard ana calloused work
ing for him.
So he let's the Iove-time of life
go by. for romantic love belongs
as exclusively to youth as apple
blooms do to spring. A middle-aged
man and woman may feel for each
other a deep. peaceful. congeniaI
friendship, but that is all. Not for
them are the glory and the thrill
and the circling wings of romance.
Ihey are the sole prerogative of
youth. and to miss them is to have
missed the one divine draught of
life.
The man who puts off marryinr
until he can give his wife a satin
depriving her of the greatest happj-
ness that can ever come to a wo-
man And that is. helping her hus-
hand.
No woman. except of the mos,
contemplate type. wants to be a
parasite. No woman who loves her
husband. loves him for what he
can give her. Real love maens
service. and every woman who is ft
TOT man to marry, yearns, above
everything else, to be her husbands
partner. his comrade. who fights
shoulder to shoulder with him in
his battle for success.
There are no stories of adventure
so exciting there are no other lives
so full of interest as those of the
poor and ambitious young people
VINO have struggled, and hoped. and
planned. and triumphed together.
Nor can there be any bond between
q man and woman so strong as that
or having sacrificed and endured to-
gether.
II you will go to the wife of nv
OF our rich and famous selfmade
men. and ask her what was the
hsppiest time of her life, she will
not say that it is now, when she
lives in a palace. and wears i'm
ported frocks. and has a dozen sery-
ants to wait on her.
She will say that her best days
were those in which she did her
own work. scrimped every nickel.
and saved for weeks to buy her a
new pair of shoes, and in which she
and Jon nsat up half the night fr-
uring out how they could get the
money to enlarge their little grocery
oI>.when John read her the manu-
script Of his new play, or showed
her the model of his new invention.
II Ii a chivalrous impulse that
makes a man feel that he doesn't
want to force the woman he loves
to work for him, but Ii Is a mis-
taken impulse. none the less. 1t is
one Of the curious facts of human
nature that the more. we do for peo-
pie, the. more we love them. and
this Is especially true of women,
= The woman whose husbands conn
fort and well-being lies in her
hands, the woman whose husbands
fod must be cooked by her. his
clothes washed by her, his money
saved by her, has a feeling for him
that the rich woman never has for
her husband. 1t is a call upon the
eternal motherhood of woman, akin
TO that which makes a woman have
a tenderness for her afflicted child
that she does not have for the one
that is well, strong and self-sufi-
cient.
Nor does any man do a kindness
TO his wife by keeping her in idle