been the outcome of their little
romance had there been any competition for the lady's hand when Adam set
out to win it. I have personally always had a feeling that this first of
hymeneal experiments was rather a marriage of convenience than anything
else, and I have heard my great-great-great-grandmother say that in the
old pioneer days there was very little for a woman to choose from in the
matter of men's society.

"For a long time," she remarked, "Adam was the only man in sight, and
I was a young thing entirely without experience in worldly matters. He
seemed to my girlish fancy to be all that a man should be. His habits
were good. He neither smoked nor drank, cared apparently nothing for
cards, and barring an interest in Discosaurus Racing, had very few
sporting proclivities. We were thrown together a great deal, and
inasmuch as the life in the Garden was a somewhat lonely one, we took
considerable pleasure in each other's society. For myself, I was not
particularly anxious to be married, preferring the free and
independent life of the spinster, but as time went on and we came to
realize that the people of future generations might misunderstand us
and, as people will do, talk about us, we decided that the best way
to avoid all gossip was to announce our engagement, and at the end of
the usual period, settle down together as man and wife. I don't know
that I have ever regretted the step, though I will say that I think it
is undesirable for a young girl to enter too hastily into the
obligations of matrimony, or to marry the first man that comes along,
unless she is absolutely sure that he is the only man she could
possibly endure through three meals a day for the balance of her
life."

It must not be assumed from this little reminiscence of this first
lady in the land that her marriage was an unhappy one. I think, that
as a matter of fact, it was quite the contrary, for subsequent to the
wedding each was too busy with other matters to get thinking either
morbidly or otherwise on the subject of their individual happiness.
They took it as a matter of course, and in the division of labor which
the social conditions of the day involved, found too much to occupy
them to worry over such unimportant abstractions as mere personal
felicity.

"We were spared one of the direst afflictions of modern social life,"
Madame Eve once remarked to my mother, in talking over the old days,
"in the absence of domestic servants from o