Rensselaer Semi-Weekly Republican, Volume 41, Number 53, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 19 March 1909 — HAPPIEST TIME IN LIFE. [ARTICLE]

HAPPIEST TIME IN LIFE.

‘Let the poor child enjoy herself," said a woman whose daughter is to be married in September. “It's the happiest time of her life right now—it will be different when she’s married!" Is it “the happiest time,” that golden period just before marriage? True, the whole universe is wallowed up in the new and wonderful dream of love. Mundane things vanish into mist and the dream becomes the reality-

Do you remember Du Maurier’s joke on that supposedly “happiest’’ time? A poet and a brilliant young woman, a Girton college girl, were observed seated apart in a drawing roomfilled with a fashionable throng. Admirers of the poet, anxious to absorb some of the gems of thought that were, no doubt, dropping from the poet’s lips, stole up unnoticed, and this is what they heard:

would Lovey do? She—Lovey would die, too! At no later period In their history can two young people derive the same unreasoning happiness from so little. It Is positively true that a boy and a girl in a hammock, holding hands in the starlight, reach a point of blind eestacy only attainable by an East Indian yogi! But does all this fervor and estatic dreaming indicate the youth and maiden are the happier? Does it not rather imply that youth is content with less than maturity? The girl revels in the dream, but the woman demands fulfillment of that dream.

The Woman who is happily married who has tasted life and found it sweet who has tested love and found it sure, she is the happiest. Where, oh. where are the dreadful doubts and fears that wrung the soul of the prospective bride—all that long list of tearful questions. “Does he really love me? Do I love him enough? Suppose one of us should . discover we had made a mistake when too late?”

The young father and mother, slowly spelling out words so Dorothy, aged 4, won’t catch their meaning; the same “old married ; folk, ’’ peacefully rocking on their own front porch with the children curled up warm and rosy in their little white beds, are happiest They have begun to live.