“But what of all that?” thought Mary. “Those things are just observations. What I am going to act on is that I want John.”
At which point she stopped being a typical modern young woman.
She became a woman of the future.
“Look here,” she said to John, “I’m working. You’re working. We’re single. Very well. We’ll change it. I’m working. You’re 31 working. We’re married. Have we lost anything? And we’ve gained each other.”
They were married and Mary kept on working.
Two years later she stopped working.
In those two years she had helped John to start a home. She couldn’t operate soap kettles and candle molds and looms and smokehouses and salting tubs and spinning wheels for him. But she brought him an equivalent of it in money. She earned from $900 to $1,000 a year.
Being married, they were more thrifty. They saved a large part of her earnings. John was still spending a large part of his on extending his business, on traveling, on entertaining prospective clients, on making acquaintances. Sometimes she had to contribute some of her own money to his expense accounts. That was the fortune of war. She helped him pursue success.
“I wouldn’t give up the memory of those two years,” Mary used to say, as she sat and stitched for her children, “for anything. I shared at least a part of my husband’s youth.”
By sharing it, she won a certain happiness otherwise unattainable. They had come to know 32 each other and to help form each other’s character and to share each other’s difficulties in the years when only there is real joy in the struggle of life. They had not postponed their love till, with a settled income, John could support her in comfort and they could look back like Browning’s middle-aged estranged lovers to say: