At the same time it is quite possible to exaggerate the amount of money necessary for marriage. Show me a couple who are miserable on account of straitened circumstances, and I will show you a dozen couples who are unhappy on account of other circumstances. I suppose we all know old bachelors who have plenty of money for marriage but they have not enough courage, and they make, "I can't afford it" a mere excuse. This was the case with Pitt. When he was Prime Minister of England and had from all sources an income of about £30,000 a year he used to say that he could not afford to marry, and then some one calculated that in his household about sixty pounds of meat was allowed for each man and woman. For the more economical arrangement of his domestic affairs, if for no other reason, he ought to have married. I sometimes say to young officers who are inclined to be extravagant, "I wonder how you can afford not to be married, I could not." Certainly if a young man will smoke the best cigars and will give expensive drinks to every one who claps him upon the back and calls him "Old Man" he cannot afford to marry--why? Because he will not deny himself small and not very elevating luxuries for the sake of obtaining the great luxury of a good wife. Then if a man has a small income he must choose for a wife a girl with a slender waste, not one, that is to say, who has made her waist small by health-destroying corsets, but one who can manage her husband's income with the least amount of waste. "Why don't the men propose?" is a question which is often asked. One reason why some of them do not do so is because they are afraid of the possible extravagance of wives. I gather this from a question which was lately overheard in a ball-room. A lady of a not very retiring disposition asked a middle-aged gentleman with whom she was dancing, "Why don't you marry, can't you afford to support a wife?" "My innocent young thing," was the reply, "I can afford to keep ten wives, but I can't afford to pay the milliner's bills of one." This matter is more in the hands of the ladies than they seem to think, and things would be greatly helped if mothers, instead of seeking only to marry their daughters to rich men, would educate these young ladies in such a way that men who are not wealthy could afford the luxury of marrying them. I know a mother who got a large family of daughters off her hands by telling prudent young men in confidence that the puddings they tasted at her house were all concocted by her daughters, and that the dear girls made their own dresses and hats. At what age should men marry? I have heard of them doing so as young as twenty, but it is useless to argue with people like this who may be said not to have come to years of discretion. A man who lived to a very advanced age accounted for his doing so by saying that he had never stood when he might have sat, that he married late, and was soon left a widower.