And continuing my Utopia, but bringing it down to the level of earth; were I a woman and had I doubts about the sincerity of the passion awakened in my fiancé, I should wish him to make a journey through all Europe which should last a year, and if on his return he still found me worthy of him, I would give him my hand with the certainty of having a loving and faithful husband. Time is a valuable element to add weight to our choice; it is one of the best gauges of comparison by which to distinguish true love from carnal excitement. It is an old axiom, confirmed by universal experience, that time cools and extinguishes the small attacks of love, but strengthens and invigorates the more serious ones. The fatal brevity of our lives, the natural impatience of all those in love, conspire together to hasten marriage, but as far as I know and am able, I recommend men and women to acquire the sainted virtue of patience. I pray women again and again in their love affairs (in which as people say they are more _men_ than we are), to follow the tactics of Fabius the temporizer: wait, wait, and still wait. Love is centred in a most serious moment, one most pregnant with consequences to our whole lives, and a month or two more will only increase the dignity of the choice, and be a guarantee for the future. The honeymoon will shine all the longer above our horizon, the more we wait for it, with the poetry of desire and the ideality of hope. CHAPTER III. AGE AND HEALTH. If a man were only a generating animal, the problem of age in marriage would be very simple, and reducible to this formula: That as long as men or women can relight the flame of life they are _marriageable_. That means that a man may marry from sixteen to sixty, and in exceptional cases up to seventy and eighty; and that he may marry a woman of from fifteen to forty-five. Man, however, is not solely a generating animal, but a thinking, reasoning, sentient, cavilling, wrangling being; a political, commercial, and religious creature; he manufactures brakes to curb the exhilaration of the gallop downhill, creates sophisms to spoil truth, and crutches to make athletes rickety; he tells many lies for amusement; in short he is the most clever and ingenious artificer in things of which he knows very little, in the whole planetary universe. Notwithstanding all these precious virtues, man finds the problem of age most complicated, when he wishes to take one of the daughters of Eve and say to her: “_Will you give me your hand, so that we may form a little future for ourselves?_” All other elements being favourable, the ideal perfection in age as regards marriage would be as follows: The man to be from twenty-five to thirty-five. The woman from eighteen to twenty-five. The man should always be a few years older than the woman, that is from five to ten years older, and this for many reasons. Man grows older more slowly than woman, and keeps his power of reproduction longer.