eech. Your womanly reserve has won his
respect, and he makes no attempts to win privileges of endearments
before he confesses his love, but frankly and manfully pleads his suit
and wins.

Oh, my dear child, this has been no matter for jesting; it has been
serious, and we who have watched this dawning love have realized that
the great drama of life, so full of tragic possibilities, is being
here enacted. We do not laugh, nor jest, but with the tenderest
prayers we welcome you into the possibilities of God's divinest gift
of human love.

CHAPTER XXVI.

RESPONSIBILITY IN MARRIAGE.

You are beginning to feel a peculiar interest in one young man more
than in any other. You think of him in his absence; you welcome his
coming; his eyes seem to caress you; the clasp of his hand thrills
you; you begin to think that you have passed from the domain of
friendship into that of love.

Before you really make that admission, let us "reason together." Let
us take a fair look at matters, and see whether it is wiser to pass
the border line, or to remain only friends. Who is this young man? You
tell me his name, but that means nothing. Who is he? What is he in
himself? What are his talents, capacities, habits, inherited
tendencies? Who is his father, his mother? What is their worth? I do
not mean in money, but in themselves? What ancestral diseases or
defects may he transmit to his posterity, which will be your posterity
if he becomes your husband? Are the family tendencies such that you
would be willing to see them repeated in your children?

There is no indelicacy in asking yourself these questions, nor in
making the investigations which will enable you to answer them
satisfactorily. The woman who marries, marries not only _into_ her
husband's family, she also marries his family; she is to become one of
it, to live with it in closer and closer companionship as her
children, bearing the family temperament, disposition and tendencies,
gather one by one around her hearth.

Is the family one of the type that she will desire to associate with
intimately all the days of her life? You may feel that it does not
matter if you do not love your husband's mother, or admire his
sisters; no matter if you do not have respect for his father, you will
live so far away from them that it will not be oftener than once in
several years that you will be obliged to meet them. It might even
happen that you would never see them, and yet it be a