WOMAN'S WORLD

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LIII, Issue 290, 2 May 1911, Page 6

WOMAN'S WORLD

(Conducted by "Eileen' 1 ),

EARLY OR LATE MARRIAGE? I With the march of recent times nothing has more changed than the outlook of the romantic maid. Once Sweet Seventeen gazed through the portals of her finishing school to see an horizon bounded by love. In that distant haze somewhere, she dreamed, lurked the lover whom she was ready to hail as her hero. And nature, who is good to simple souls, usually saw to it that she was provided I with one—of sorts. Now Seventeen accepts the horizon but ] map». out a view between. "I mean to do this and that first," she plans. The scheme may include distinctions, gold medals, travels, fortune, and possibly an ecstatic period of freedom combined with experimental cooking which she proposes to share with a chum in a flat. It obviously must take a long time to fulfil. At the end is the ideal husband. Only one thing she leaves out of her reckoning. This is the marriage rate, whose figures point inexorably to the conclusion that matrimony as an after-thought becomes by-and-by rather difficult to achieve.

No one at all in the confidence of mo-1 dern womanhood can fail to remark that | marriage is in a state of evolution. Two | schools of thought may "be said to divide] the camp. There is the eugenical, most-] ly led by people who comb straight the liair from an intellectual brow, wear square-toed boots, and don't marry. These write and lecture, however, and undeniably help to form the budding idea. The second new teaching is pure idealist. It's most ethereal —and attenuated—version of the lovers' meeting is for the prsdestinated two to sit themselves down ill solitude at an hour agreed and project thought waves Across the intervening space. Midway in" a whole realm of tempesttossed confusion physical and spiritual schools have their following in degrees varying and according to temperament. While still the most scholarly singularly fail to perceive that the essential importance in marriage is not its approach from this side or that—but the fact as to whether it does or does not take place with full advantages of Nature's great conspiracy.

To a matron of twenty years or more of married hie there may come a quaint experience. She is expressing herself, perhaps, after the custom of her kind on the contrariness of husbands, and a bridal pair standing by who have taken on the estate late in the forties because of compatible taste exchange a superior smile.

"How savage!" they would seem to exclaim, as a patch-and-powder exquisite might have at the ruggedness of the Alps, and then turned complacently to order cascades for the chateau gardens. Joy and sorrow, life and death, have touched the destiny of the man and woman who took the burden with the vision and. now occasionally fall out about the tradesmen's books, Harry's scrapes, or Dolly's love affairs. In another ten years one may safely prophesy they will be stouter or tK'ner, '""rtainly greyer, still lov-ng and s'ill differing. While, as.for the two good people what at a mature age decided for complete compatibility and no responsibility—what save ignorance would put them in the same class at all?

In reckoning up the pros and cons of late or early marriage, it seems clear that for the wedded state to build character there must necessarily be a goodi measure of youth. Then I venture to think that, for the average, recruits' drill is not in it with the disciplinary broadening, straightening, generally expanding,! and —incidentally—unpleasant method of the almost daily minor conflicts between i masculine and feminine points of view. I Cook has said, "This day month, mum," I unexpectedly, and Mr. Lovebird, as his sex is wont, is for arguing spaciously I from the premise of Jane's sudden notice | to the caprice of woman in general. Mrs.' Lovebird objects to this arraignment of femininity in a lump, and with some skill plausibly connects the position of affairs with his language about the cutlets on the previous evening. | The fond couple may chill during the, encounter from cooing "chickabiddvs" to cold "my dears," but the process is wholly corrective and estrangement temporary. Overbearing cock-o'-the-walkedness of Monsier receives a salutary douche from Madame's to quoque. She, for her part, has been goaded into that generous esprit de corps which glows at the attack of man as enemy. A perpetual modification i is being carried on comparable to Na-I ture's way with, her world forces. There is equalisation and development, with the objective always that husband and wife shall be efficient heads of the supremely important family. •Marriage early enough to mean real immaturity merits no defence. Usually it spells disaster, and vital statistics are all against the mother in her 'teens. A vast gulf lies between the healthful interplay of contracting temperaments and the awful risk of having to do one's most elementary taste-and-proclivity formation side by side with another rapidlygrowing creature compounded of unknown quantities, to whom one is irrevocably pledged. These are the young people whom responsibilities over-burden. The boy who j has not lost the rawness of a recruit, or I a 'varsity fresher," is not fit to be the breadwinner and to take the head of his table. Child-wives, too, have ways their elders view 'with regret. They rock cradles violently until their offsprings' brains swim. And they let baby sample the coal-scuttle while they rush through the climax of a new novel. Most juvenile married couples get tragic on the least provocation. Their still instinctiveness clinging to parental leading-strings makes them invoke "my mother" not wisely but too well. In those throes of the first five unfit years they lose the bloom and brightness that is the normal possession of the properly matched far into the thirties. Popularly, new woman is supposed to wish to evade its duties and object to the consequent curtailment of her leisure. While with rather strange logic it is admitted that the typical girl of the age is ready to take up exacting professions that'leave the merest margin for the recreation she is rumored to crave. { This contradictory state of tilings is . worth investigation. To anyone in touch I with the true temper of the girl in the forward movement, there seems an inevit-

able conclusion. Manifestly she does not fear responsibility, nor is she lazy. But she does dread the stifling of her individuality against which a crude marriage code offers no guarantee. Possible deprivations of right to opinions and scope for talents she rebels from with a passionate soul. The wooing of youth is to jbe but aside if its sequel is relegation to the meanest economic rung and shackling with unreasoning jealousy. If one can read signs of the tames a definition of the honorable place of help-meet and house-mother is what she will presently demand. She will not yield her years of promise to a master whose notion of her "proper" sphere may be hashing mutton and "making over" last season's clothes.