Life is made to live in and enjoy. We make only one journey. We need not open up our purses and leak out the pennies, just to see them roll around promiscuously; but cutting notches on a stick for each one of them, and never spending, even for necessaries, without dread and grudging, is intolerable. I had rather be poor and enjoy something.
Don’t marry too far apart in ages. June and December is a long, long distance in matrimony. Some people are as young-hearted at sixty as others are at forty. Some men at forty-five have hardly reached their manhood. But old, white-headed men, marrying girls in their teens—servants generally—are pitiable spectacles. To the girl it is suicide; to the man sheer folly; no need of marrying the man. The girl is the most interested in this don’t sentence. Why not, if you love him? This is the reason, not jealousy,—that is a partial reason,—but consistency. Think of a trip round the world or across the continent with one older than your father, to be called your husband, to be your husband! It must be humiliating. It is annoying. It is foolishly silly and inconsistent. Money is a small compensation for such a sacrifice. Love, and love only, should govern marriage, and I doubt its sincerity when the difference goes beyond reason.
Marry one whom you trust, admire, respect, look up to, and confide in, can be true to, and one whom you love from good and earnest motives. “Respect is a cold lunch in a dark dining-room. Love is a picnic in the woods.” Think of a picnic and an old man escort!
Don’t marry too old. Be in earnest about it. Here is the thought in a nut-shell:
TOO OLD TO LOVE.
I.
“I never loved but one,” she said;
“I loved him just for fun,” she said;
And, saying this, she swung her head—
Had she been frank, they had been wed.