t the _right_ time. He goes unmarried
through the romantic period of his development, when the senses are at
their keenest and when the other sex, in its most vividly idealized
perfection, is most poignantly desired.

Then, later on, he may begin to get a larger income. Then marriage may
become more feasible. But then romance is waning. Then, as Mr. Johnson
says, "his standard of personal comfort rises." Romance has been
succeeded by calculation. "Accordingly he postpones marriage to a date
in the indefinite future or abandons expectation of it altogether."

Celibacy through the age of romance! It's emotionally wrong.
Sexlessness for a score of years after sex has awakened! It's
biologically wrong. It's a defiance of nature. And nature responds, as
she does to every defiance, with a scourge of physical and social
ills.

"But what of all that?" thought Mary. "Those things are just
observations. What I am going to act on is that I want John."

At which point she stopped being a typical modern young woman.

_She became a woman of the future._

"Look here," she said to John, "I'm working. You're working. We're
single. Very well. We'll change it. I'm working. You're working.
We're married. Have we lost anything? And we've gained each other."

They were married and Mary kept on working.

Two years later she stopped working.

In those two years she had helped John to start a home. She couldn't
operate soap kettles and candle molds and looms and smokehouses and
salting tubs and spinning wheels for him. But she brought him an
equivalent of it in money. She earned from $900 to $1,000 a year.

Being married, they were more thrifty. They saved a large part of her
earnings. John was still spending a large part of his on extending his
business, on traveling, on entertaining prospective clients, on making
acquaintances. Sometimes she had to contribute some of her own money
to his expense accounts. That was the fortune of war. She helped him
pursue success.

"I wouldn't give up the memory of those two years," Mary used to say,
as she sat and stitched for her children, "for anything. I shared at
least a part of my husband's youth."

By sharing it, she won a certain happiness otherwise unattainable.
They had come to know each other and to help form each other's
character and to share each other's difficulties in the years when
only there is real joy in the struggle of life. They had not postponed
their love till, with a se