al attraction, but none of these is love. Love, to be
worthy the name, must be a superstructure built upon a firm foundation
of acquaintance with each other's true qualities. Love is not a
balloon, in which two young people may go sailing among the clouds,
away from all regions of every-day life. Those who try it with that
idea find the cloud-world cold and uncomfortable, and not at all the
rosy, gold-tinted region it looked at a distance.

Love is rather like a building with foundations set into the
earth--foundations solid, firmly laid and durable. How can people love
when they do not know each other? Acquaintance first, then friendship,
comradeship; then, if the sentiment grows, love. But how are young
people to get really acquainted? They meet under unreal conditions.
They see each other in society, in Sunday dress and with Sunday
manners. They doubtless do not mean to deceive each other, but there
is little to draw out the real self. There is nothing to disturb or
irritate, nothing to prove the honesty, the neatness, the industry,
the persistence, the business ability; nothing to disclose the true
ideas in matters of serious import, of health, religion, duties of
husbands and wives, the government of the home; and too often the
intimacy of marriage discloses many personal peculiarities of temper,
habits and manners that, if seen in time, would have prevented
marriage.

The trouble does not originate with young people themselves, but with
older people; but as the young people of to-day will be the older
people of the future, it would be well for them to realize what the
trouble is. The fact is, that in the present conditions of society the
association of young people is unnatural. From earliest childhood boys
and girls are taught to think of each other only in sentimental ways.
The little boys and girls in school are playing at "lovering," and
their conversation is often more about beaus and sweethearts than
about the plays of childhood, which alone should occupy their
thoughts. You remember that little miss of ten who asked you, when you
were sixteen, who was your beau. You recall her look of surprise when
you replied that you had none, and her exclamation, "Have no beau!
Why, how do you get along without one?" What made such a mere child
imagine a beau to be an essential agent of a girl's life? Because she
had been taught by the jests and suggestions of her elders that every
boy was a possible lover, and, young