women seem to make better wives when they have
reaped this harvest. Take for example the cases of Yvonne and Yvette
which are personally known to me. Yvette was engaged at eighteen and
married at twenty-one. At the age of twenty-six she was the mother of
four children. She had scarcely time to realise what youth meant and
begin to enjoy it before her girlhood was stifled under the
responsibilities of marriage and maternity. She had accepted her first
offer, and he was practically the only man she knew anything of. Beyond
him she had seen nothing of men, or of the world; certainly she had
never flirted or had men friends or enjoyed any admiration but that of
her _fiance_.

At twenty-six Yvette began to realise that she had been cheated out of a
very precious part of life and an invaluable experience. Though a fairly
happy wife and a devoted mother, she felt that she might have had those
lost delights as well as the domestic joys, and the knowledge enraged
her.

A dangerous spirit of curiosity entered her heart, and a still more
dangerous longing for adventure and excitement. She realised that there
were other men in the world who admired her besides her Marcus, and that
she was pretty and still quite a young woman. At thirty Yvette was a
mistress of the art of intrigue--had engineered several dangerous
_affaires_, and might have come to serious grief had not Marcus been a
singularly wise, tender, and understanding husband.

'It isn't that I don't love him dearly,' she confided in me when
resolving to turn over a new leaf. 'I wouldn't exchange him for anyone
in the world, and you know what the children are to me--but somehow I
want something else as well--some excitement. I feel I've had no _fun_
in my life, and I wanted to have a fling before it was too late. When I
was engaged I scarcely ever even danced with anyone but Marcus, and for
the first four years of my married life I had a baby every eighteen
months--it was nothing but babies, nursing the old one and getting ready
for the new one! Not that I didn't love it, but the reaction was bound
to come, and it did. If only I could have had the excitement and the
gaiety and the glamour first, and then married when I was about
twenty-five, I should have been perfectly satisfied then, like Yvonne!'

Yvonne certainly managed her affairs better. Fate saved her from the
misfortune of falling in love too soon. She always had a train of
admirers, and was enabled to enjoy th