near her, bidding himself
to forget her although he knew that such forgetting was impossible,
hankering after the sound of her voice and the touch of her hand, and
something of the tenderness of returned affection,--and yet regarding
her as a prize altogether out of his reach! Why should she be out
of his reach? She had no money, and he had not a couple of hundred
pounds in the world. But he was earning an income which would give
them both shelter and clothes and bread and cheese.

What reader is there, male or female, of such stories as is this, who
has not often discussed in his or her own mind the different sides of
this question of love and marriage? On either side enough may be said
by any arguer to convince at any rate himself. It must be wrong for a
man, whose income is both insufficient and precarious also, not only
to double his own cares and burdens, but to place the weight of that
doubled burden on other shoulders besides his own,--on shoulders that
are tender and soft, and ill adapted to the carriage of any crushing
weight. And then that doubled burden,--that burden of two mouths to
be fed, of two backs to be covered, of two minds to be satisfied, is
so apt to double itself again and again. The two so speedily become
four, and six! And then there is the feeling that that kind of
semi-poverty, which has in itself something of the pleasantness of
independence, when it is borne by a man alone, entails the miseries
of a draggle-tailed and querulous existence when it is imposed on a
woman who has in her own home enjoyed the comforts of affluence. As a
man thinks of all this, if he chooses to argue with himself on that
side, there is enough in the argument to make him feel that not only
as a wise man but as an honest man, he had better let the young lady
alone. She is well as she is, and he sees around him so many who have
tried the chances of marriage and who are not well! Look at Jones
with his wan, worn wife and his five children, Jones who is not yet
thirty, of whom he happens to know that the wretched man cannot look
his doctor in the face, and that the doctor is as necessary to the
man's house as is the butcher! What heart can Jones have for his work
with such a burden as this upon his shoulders? And so the thinker,
who argues on that side, resolves that the young lady shall go her
own way for him.

But the arguments on the other side are equally cogent, and so much
more alluring! And they are used by the