After puberty, and during early adolescence, when a certain amount of knowledge has been acquired, we leave youth free to learn lies from advertisements, carefully calculated to foster the tendency to hypochondria, which is often associated with such matters. Of this, however, no more need now be said, since it scarcely concerns the girl. It is the ignorance conditioned by prudery that is responsible later on for many criminal marriages; contracted, it may be, with the blind blessing of Church and State, which, however, the laws of heredity and infection rudely ignore. Parents cannot bring themselves to inquire into matters which profoundly concern the welfare of the daughter for whom they propose to make what appears to be a good marriage. They desire, of course, that her children shall be healthy and whole-minded; they do not desire that marriage should be for her the beginning of disease, from the disastrous effects of which she may never recover. But these are delicate matters, and prudery forbids that they should be inquired into; yet every father who permits his daughter to marry without having satisfied himself on these points is guilty, at the least, of grave delinquency of duty, and may, in effect, be conniving at disasters and desolations of which he will not live to see the end. Young people often grow fond of each other and become engaged, and then, if the engagement be prolonged--as all engagements ought to be, as a general rule--they may find that, after all, they do not wish to marry. Yet the girl's mother, an imprudent prude, may often in this and other cases do her utmost to bring the marriage about, not because she is convinced that it means her daughter's highest welfare and happiness, but because prudery dictates that her daughter must marry the man with whom she has been so frequently seen; hence very likely lifelong unhappiness, and worse.