Out of his two years' experience he had saved a few hundred dollars. No, he hadn't. That isn't probable. The way he made his start into the next phase of his career was not by having any ready money. Having ready money is far from being characteristic of the young man of to-day.
John opened his office as a consulting electrical engineer not on his own resources but as an agent for an electrical supply company. Being agent for that company assured him enough money to pay the office rent and stenographer. For the rest, for his meals and his bed, he depended on his clients. Whom he didn't have. But he started out to get them.
He opened his office in the city in which Mary was.
And then a strange but normal thing occurred. They spent enough money on theatres and boat rides and candy in the next three months to have paid the rent on a flat. It is true John's net income was too small and uncertain to have justified the founding of a family. But it was also true that they spent every cent they had. The celibate life is an extravagant life. One of the innumerable sources of modern extravagance is found just there.
Mary reflected on it. She didn't like it. And she began to see other things she didn't like in this protraction of the period of singleness.
Her work for the Bureau of Labor had taken her into many places, among all sorts of women. She began to observe the irregular living which is inevitably associated with a system of late marriages.
Mr. Lester F. Ward has learnedly and elaborately informed us that if we go back to the origin of life on this planet we shall find that the female was the only sex then existent, being original life itself, reproducing itself by division of itself, and that the male was created as an afterthought of nature's for the purpose of introducing greater variation into the development of living things. The male, to begin with, had only one function. That was to be a male. He was purely a sex-thing.
Whether this biological theory stands or falls, it is certain that it squares with the present character of the sexes. The sex which originated as a sex-thing remains the more actively sexed.
There was once a very good sociologist called Robert Louis Stevenson who made many researches into the psychology of the human race. While on his "Inland Voyage" he observed in this matter that "it is no use for a man to take to the woods; we know him; Anthony tried the same thing long ago and had a pitiful time of it by all accounts. But there is this about some women, that they suffice to themselves and can walk in a high and cold zone without the countenance of any trousered being."
The celibate life is more possible for most of them by nature. If it were not for that fact, the postponement of marriage would by this time have demolished the ethical code.