The Birmingham age-herald., 1924-09-22

of the window in those cases where the wolf camps on the doorstep, and the man is always anxious and harried by debt and the woman is too hard worked and tired to care how she looks, and sheer nerves keep both of them snap ping at each other.
 The young woman does not agree with this view of the subject She wants to be married at once. She says that she thinks that if the young man is really in love with her, he would grab her up and rush with her to the altar without stopping to consider such paltry thing as. how they were to live.
 And they both ask me to referee their little sparring match.
 think the man is dead right in taking a good, long look ahead be- fore. he leaps into the sea of matri- mony. think. he not only shows good,. hard horse sense in wanting to wait until he can afford to marry, but that he proves his devotion to the ] girl in not being willing to drag her down into poverty.
 It's all we'll we'll for a girl who has had three square meals every day of her | life and a charge account at the best stores to assume high and romantic attitude, and scorn mere money, and declare that she is willing to live on bread and cheese and kisses with the man she loves.
 She has never tried it. She doesn't know that bread and cheese soon pail upon the appetite of those accustomed to filet mignon and lobster Newberg. | -l-a xLux Akna xhe are doomed to live just on bread and cheese and kisses soon drop the kisses off of the menu. Yet such is the sordid truth.
 Before we can be romantic we have got to be comfortable. Before we can joy it who can affort it.
 No matter how much a young couple may be in love with each other, they have got to come down out of the clouds when they get mar ried and live in a hard and practi- cal world, in which they must reckon with the landlord and settle with the butcher and baker. And their abil- Il ,ity to keep on being in love with each 4 other depends to a large extent on their being able to do this.
 No ideal home has the bill collector perpetually battering on the door. No man who cannot make living remains godling long in his wife's eyes. No woman who is slatternly and over worked, and who lacks the time and the strength to take any pains with her personal appearance, looks like tho angel of his dreams to her husband. No one who is worried over trying to make ends meet on an insufficient income wastes any time speculating as to the temperature of the affections of the partner of his or her bosom.
 It is a pity that there is price is. Matrimony must pay the luxury l tag on love, but alas and alack, there love we have to be well fed. Nature settled that business when it made our stomachs three or four times as big as our hearts.
 This is why marrying on shoe string is such a hazardous venture. The glamour of romance that made a youth and maiden feel that they asked nothing else of fate but just the privilege of being together soon fades away, and then their happiness depends upon their being able to have the things and do the things they have been accumstomed to having and doing all their lives.
 If this is impossible; if they, who have been used to living in beautiful and artistic surroundings, must live in cheap and ugly lodgings; if they, who have always dressed well, must go shabby; if they, who have always gone to theaters and concerts and parties, are too poor to afford any amusement, then they would be more than human if each did not blame the other for having dragged him or her into the wretched folly of an unsuitable marriage.
 For a man to marry before he can afford it nearly always means that he dooms himself to stay at the bot tom of the ladder. He cannot climb
 with the weight of a family on his back. He cannot save when the daily living takes every cent that he can possibly earn. He dare not risk his wife's and his children's bread by