TWO DANGEROUS BIRTHDAYS.

Waimate Daily Advertiser, Volume VI, Issue 8, 21 January 1905, Page 5 (Supplement)

TWO DANGEROUS BIRTHDAYS.

Did you ever think that there are two occasions in a woman’s life when she is liable to marry anyone who asks her? This is when alie is seventeen and twentyseven, but between these ages she picks and chooses, and if she commits matrimony it is a case of meeting her ideal or outside influence.

If a debutante doesn’t marry the first man who asks her it is because her guardian angel is attending strictly to business and wards off the danger. It isn’t the girl’s fault. To a, girl the thought that she has inspired affection in a man’s heart is so unutterably flattering, and she feels so grateful to him for singling her out from tin* others of her sex that she easily persuades herself that she is in love.

By the time she is nineteen it is no longer any man. It is some man. She has begun to have an ideal. He mmst be tall, and dark, and passionate, with a mysterious past. Preferably his faith should have been shaken in his kind, and he should take desperate and pessimistic view of life. At twenty her ideal has changed. It is more practical and Icgs romantic. She cuts out the looks and the hard luck story, and adores strength and earnestness and a lofty way of looking at things. She becomes a hero worshipper and burns incense before matinee idols and social settlement workers, and discovers unappreciated geniuses in newspaper scribblers and long-haired poets. This is the time when the curate and the missionary fraternity generally have their innings, and when, unless she has somebody to save her life, a girl is apt to marry a poet or elope with her music teacher.