She didn’t like it. And she began to see other things she didn’t like in this protraction of the period of singleness.

Her work for the Bureau of Labor had taken her into many places, among all sorts of women. She began to observe the irregular living which is inevitably associated with a system of late marriages.

Mr. Lester F. Ward has learnedly and elaborately informed us that if we go back to the origin of life on this planet we shall find that the female was the only sex then existent, being original life itself, reproducing itself by division of itself, and that the male was created as an afterthought of nature’s for the purpose of introducing greater variation into the development of living things. The male, to begin with, 26 had only one function. That was to be a male. He was purely a sex-thing.

Whether this biological theory stands or falls, it is certain that it squares with the present character of the sexes. The sex which originated as a sex-thing remains the more actively sexed.

There was once a very good sociologist called Robert Louis Stevenson who made many researches into the psychology of the human race. While on his “Inland Voyage” he observed in this matter that “it is no use for a man to take to the woods; we know him; Anthony tried the same thing long ago and had a pitiful time of it by all accounts. But there is this about some women, that they suffice to themselves and can walk in a high and cold zone without the countenance of any trousered being.”

The celibate life is more possible for most of them by nature. If it were not for that fact, the postponement of marriage would by this time have demolished the ethical code.

Even as things stand, Mary was quite willing to admit, when she saw it, that there are two kinds of women greatly increasing in modern 27 days. Both have always existed, but now they are increasing very rapidly and in parallel lines of corresponding development.

In one column is the enormous army of young women who remain unmarried till twenty-five, till thirty, till thirty-five. Even at that last age, and beyond it, in a well-developed city like, say, Providence, R.I., in the age period from thirty-five to forty-five, twenty out of every hundred women are still single.

In the other column is the enormous army of young women who, outside of the marriage relation altogether, lead a professional sex life, venal, furtive, ignoble, and debasing; an army which has existed since the beginning of time but which every postponement of the age of marriage causes to increase in relative numbers and to gain new strength for poisoning the blood of life.

Love, denied at the front door, flies in by the cellar window. Angel or bat, it is always with us. Our only choice is between its guises.

Mary looked at the army of women celibates in offices and in stores and in their apartments and in their boarding houses, women celibates 28 five and ten and fifteen and twenty years into the period when nature has by irrepealable edict ordained love. It was surely unnatural, for the mass of them. They were not vowed nuns. They were not devoted to any great cause. They were just ordinary, normal young women, thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of them.

Then, on the other side, Mary looked at the great army of women in the midnight restaurants, in the streets, in their segregated quarters—women who, however they may be sentimentalized about and however irresponsible they may be for their own condition, are, as a matter of fact, ignorant, stupid, silly, and dirty. Yet on them was squandered the emotional life of millions of young men.

On the one side—intelligent, capable, effective young women, leading lives of emotional sterility. On the other side—inferior women blasted and withered by their specialization in the emotional life of youth!

The connection between postponement of marriage and irregularity of living will be admitted by everybody who is willing to face facts and 29 who is optimist enough to believe that if, instead of letting facts sleep, we rouse them and fight them we can make a better race.

The great Russian scientist, Metchnikoff, successor to Pasteur in the Pasteur Institute, mentions the postponement of marriage as one of the biological disharmonies of life. It is a disharmony that “among highly civilized peoples marriage and regular unions are impossible at the right time.”

And Mr. A. S. Johnson, writing in the authoritative report of the committee of fifteen on the social evil, notes the parallel increase of “young unmarried men” and of a city’s “volume of vice.”

He goes on to make, without comment, a statement of the economic facts of the case.

“As a rule,” he says, “the income which a young man earns, while sufficient to secure a fair degree of comfort for himself, does not suffice for founding a family.”

He cannot found a family at 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 30 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 31 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 32 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 settled income, John could support her in comfort and they could look back like Browning’s middle-aged estranged lovers to say: