a
notable increase in the number of marriages in which the preponderance
of years was on the wrong side. Also that it was not until after our
own war that the heroine of fiction began to reverse the immemorial
procedure and marry a man her inferior in years. In other words,
anything she could get. This would almost argue that fiction is not
only the historian of life but its apologist.

It is quite true that young men coming to maturity during majestic
periods of the world's history are not likely to have the callow
brains and petty ideals which distinguished the average youth of
peace. Even boys of fourteen these days talk intelligently of the war
and the future. They read the newspapers, even subscribing for one if
at a boarding-school. In the best of the American universities the men
have been alive to the war from the first, and a large proportion of
the young Americans who have done gallant service with the American
Ambulance Corps had recently graduated when the war broke out. Others
are serving during vacations, and are difficult to lure back to their
studies.

Some of the young Europeans of eighteen or twenty will come home from
the trenches when peace is declared, and beyond a doubt will compel
the love if not the respect of damsels of twenty-five and upward. But
will they care whether they fascinate spinsters of twenty-five and
upward, or not? The fact is not to be overlooked that there will be as
many young girls as youths, and as these girls also have matured
during their long apprenticeship to sorrow and duty, it is not to be
imagined they will fail to interest young warriors of their own
age--nor fail to battle for their rights with every device known to
the sex.

Temperament must be taken into consideration, of course, and a certain
percentage of men and women of unbalanced ages will be drawn together.
That happens in times of peace. Moreover it is likely that a large
number of young Germans in this country either will conceive it their
duty to return to Germany and marry there or import the forlorn in
large numbers. If they have already taken to themselves American wives
it is on the cards that they will renounce them also. There is nothing
a German cannot be made to believe is his duty to the Fatherland, and
he was brought up not to think. But if monarchy falls in Germany, and
a republic, socialistic or merely democratic, rises on the ruins, then
it is more than likely that the superfluous women wi