Into why she waited, and why she wouldn't wait any longer, chance put most of the simple plot of the commonplace modern drama, "Love Deferred." It is so commonplace that it is doubtful if any other drama can so stretch the nerves or can so draw from them a thin, high note of fine pain.
We will pretend that John was a doctor. No, that's too professional. He was a civil engineer. That's professional enough and more commercial. It combines Technique and Business, which are the two big elements in the life of Modern Man.
When they got engaged, Mary was through college, but John had one more year to go in engineering school.
How the preparation for life does lengthen itself out!
When Judge Story was professor at Harvard in the thirties of the last century, he put the law into his pupils' heads in eighteen months. The present professors require three years.
In 1870 the Harvard Medical School made you attend classes for four months in each of three years. It now makes you do it for nine months in each of four years.
As for engineering, the University of Wisconsin gave John a chill by informing him in its catalogue that "it is coming to be generally recognized that a four-year technical course following the high-school course is not an adequate preparation for those who are to fill important positions; and the University would urge all those who can afford the time to extend their studies over a period of five or six years."
John compromised on five. This gave him a few Business courses in the College of Commerce in addition to his regular Technique courses in the College of Engineering. He was now a Bachelor of Science.
He thereupon became an apprentice in the shops of one of the two biggest electrical firms in the United States. He inspected the assembling of machines before they were shipped, and he overheard wisdom from foremen and superintendents. His salary was fifteen cents an hour. Since he worked about ten hours a day, his total income was about forty dollars a month. At the end of the year he was raised to fifty. This was the normal raise for a Bachelor of Science.
The graduates of Yale and Harvard in the bright colonial days of those institutions married almost immediately on graduation. John didn't. He didn't get married so early nor become a widower so often. He didn't carry so many children to the christening font nor so many to the cemetery.