the
zeal of their response. But everywhere the war signifies economic stress
which must necessarily continue long after the war is over, and in the
present state of knowledge that stress means fewer children. The family,
already light, will grow lighter. This means that marriage, although it
may be by no means less emotionally sacred, will become a lighter thing.

Once, to be married was a woman's whole career. Household cares, a dozen
children, and she was consumed. All her romances ended in marriage. All
a decent man's romance ended there, too. She proliferated and he toiled,
and when the married couple had brought up some of their children and
buried the others, and blessed their first grandchildren, life was
over.

Now, to be married is an incident in a woman's career, as in a man's.
There is not the same necessity of that household, not the same close
tie; the married woman remains partially a freewoman and assimilates
herself to the freewoman. There is an increasing disposition to group
solitary children and to delegate their care to specially qualified
people, and this is likely to increase, because the high earning power
of young women will incline them to entrust their children to others,
and because a shortage of men and an excess of widows will supply other
women willing to undertake that care. The more foolish women will take
these releases as a release into levity, but the common sense of the
newer types of women will come to the help of men in recognising the
intolerable nuisance of this prolongation of flirting and charming on
the part of people who have had what should be a satisfying love.

Nor will there be much wealth or superfluity to make levity possible and
desirable. Winsome and weak womanhood will be told bluntly by men and
women alike that it is a bore. The frou-frou of skirts, the delicate
mysteries of the toilette, will cease to thrill any but the very young
men. Marriage, deprived of its bonds of material necessity, will demand
a closer and closer companionship as its justification and excuse. A
marriage that does not ripen into a close personal friendship between
two equals will be regarded with increasing definiteness as an
unsatisfactory marriage.

These things are not stated here as being desirable or undesirable. This
is merely an attempt to estimate the drift and tendency of the time as
it has been accentuated by the war. It works out to the realisation that
marriage is likely to co