In the middle-classes love still presupposes marriage (though the idea is not so fast-rooted as in the old days), but how the dickens is he to manage it? He is just starting his career as Something in the City, or as a solicitor, barrister, journalist, artist, doctor. His income is barely sufficient for himself, according to his way of life, which includes decent clothes, a club, a game of golf when he feels like it, a motor-cycle or a small car, a holiday abroad, theatres, a bachelor dinner now and again--the usual thing. He belongs to the younger generation, with wider interests, larger ideas, higher ambitions than those with which his father and mother started life. He could not start on their level. Times have changed. He remembers his father’s reminiscences of early struggles, of the ceaseless anxiety to make both ends meet, of the continual stinting and scraping to keep the children “decent,” to provide them with a good education, to give them a fair start in life. He remembers his mother in his own childhood. She was always mending stockings. There was always a litter of needlework on the dining-room table after supper. There were times when she “did” without a maid, and exhausted herself with domestic drudgery. There were no foreign holidays then, only a week or two at the seaside once a year. There was precious little pocket money for the boys. They were conscious of their shabby gentility, and hated it. The modern young man looks with a kind of horror upon all this domestic squalor, as he calls it. He couldn’t stand it. If marriage means that for him he will have none of it. But need it mean that? He and Winifred will scheme out their lives differently. They will leave out the baby side of the business--until they can afford to indulge in it. They will live in a little flat, and furnish it, if necessary, on the hire system. They will cut out the domestic drudgery. They will enjoy the fun of life, and shelve the responsibilities until they are able to pay for them. After all it will not be long before he is earning a good income. He has got his feet on the first rang of the ladder, and, with a little luck---- So he proposes to the girl, and she pretends to be immensely surprised, though she has been eating her heart out while he hesitated, and delayed, and pondered. They pledge each other, “till death do us part,” and the girl, who has been reading a great many novels lately, is very happy because her own plot is working out according to the rules of romance.