I.
Love Deferred
Mary felt she would wait for John even if, instead of going away on a career, he were going away on a comet.
She waited for him from the time she was twenty-two to the time she was twenty-six, and would have waited longer if she hadn’t got angry and insisted on marrying him.
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, 4 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.