Evening Republican, Volume 14, Number 228, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 24 September 1910 — LOVE STAYS YOUNG [ARTICLE]

LOVE STAYS YOUNG

WOMEN NEVER BECOME TOO OLD TO MARRY. Healthy Exercise and Activity of Mind Combine to Keep Woman Still Young When She Might Be Grandmother. Time was when, if a girl was hot married at 21, she was supposed to resign herself to the single life for the rest of her days. A little later on in the world’s history—indeed, within the memory of those living—it was thought that 25 was the utmost limit at which a woman’s despairing hopes could cling to matrimony. The early marriage is the exception now, not the rule; and there is much wonder and objection nowadays over the marriage of a girl of 17 as there would once have been over that of a woman of 70. In old days, royal princesses mar•ried at 17. In these days they marry at seven-and-twenty, or even much later. No doubt one reason lies in the fact that women no longer give up their youth as prematurely as they used to do. At five-and-twenty a woman once laid aside all feminine vanity, betook herself in hideous styles of dressing, and gave up all her activity and her interest in the outside world. Of course, she grew old at once.

Nowdays, healthy f exercise, activity of mind, and manifold interests combine to keep a woman still young at an age when she might be a grandmother. People are inclined to suppose that mercenary motives alone can account for the marriage of a woman advanced in life; but this is a great mistake. In many cases it is an old lover, long parted by time and circumstances, who makes his appearance again, and wins her at last, though he has waited so long to do it To him she never seems old—the old love casts over her a glamor still that makes her retain the charm and fascination of the days when he first courted her, and he is as proud of her as if she were still the girl he wooed in the long past days every one else has forgotten. Sometimes they have only met in later days. No reason, on that account, for younger people to fancy all sentiment and romance must needs be dead within them. There is much romance, sometimes, lingering under a faded exterior as under one in its first bloom, and there is absolutely no putting a date to the time when love taust needs cease to have any power Over the huipan heart. To the woman whose character is her chiefest charm, and 1 who possesses that strange, mysterious gift we call -fascination, there is really no putting any limit to the time when her chances of marriage are at an . end. Men find her as delightful a companion, as ready in her sympathy, as charming in her talk as when she was a girl; in fact, she is often far more so, because the experiences of life have mellowed her judgment and made her more interestd in others than in herself. Such a woman may be loved and wooed long after the woman whose only attraction was her pretty face has been neglected. How wise, then, for girls to cultivate the graces of mind and manner that really charm, no matter what nature has bestowed upon them in the way of outside attraction.