THE SAFE TIME TO MARRY.

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

THE SAFE TIME TO MARRY.

Twenty-two is a time of comparative safety. She has begun to enjoy herself and achieve a certain philosophy. She still looks forward to matrimony as she does to heaven, as the reward of the blerst, but she is in no hurry to enter into it. She is having too good a time as it is, and she hesitates to exchange the violets and chocolate of many admirers for the bread-and-butter of one. This is the time when a girl uses her head as well as her heart to select a life partner, and when she is most apt to make a wise choice. At twenty- seven all the danger signals ought to lie set. At that age a woman gets into a panic. She sees many girls who were her contemporaries married, and perceives suddenly that she has been pushed aside by the younger set. She is asked to chaperon parties instead of dance at them. A few grey hairs have made their appearance. Old maidenhood is staring her in the face, and her nerve deserts her. She plunges wildly, and takes the first thing that offers. This is the time when a woman is almost sure to make a foolish match. She marries the old beau who has been hanging on for years, or the widower with seven children, and spends the balance of her life wondering what made her do it.

At thirty-five, if she has passed safely over the panic period, she begins to perceive that spinsterhood has much to recommend it. She has grown a little cynical about love, from having seen so much

of it that gave out under the fiiwt stress of matrimony, and if she mari'ies she .its pretty sure to have a weather eye upon an establishment.

At forty the old maid is hopelessly addicted to her latchkey and her own purse, and her matrimonial chances are nil'. Some few widows who have acquired the habit of having a master, and are lost without one, marry after that, but the spinster rarely does. When she does, however, she throw? judgment and reason to the winds, and marries to please her fancy; and she’s just as liable to marry a boy, young enough to be her son. as anybody else.