He MUST marry young; or at least, if he does not marry, he
must find a companion, a woman to his heart, a help that is meet
for him. What is commonly called prudence in such concerns is only
another name for vice and cruelty. The purest and best of men
necessarily mate themselves before they are twenty. As a rule, it
is the selfish, the mean, the calculating, who wait, as they say,
"till they can afford to marry." That vile phrase scarcely veils
hidden depths of depravity. A man who is really a man, and who has
a genius for loving, must love from the very first, and must feel
himself surrounded by those who love him. 'Tis the first necessity
of life to him; bread, meat, raiment, a house, an income, rank far
second to that prime want in the good man's economy.
But Alan Merrick, though an excellent fellow in his way, and of
noble fibre, was not quite one of the first, the picked souls of
humanity. He did not count among the finger-posts who point the
way that mankind will travel. Though Herminia always thought him
so. That was her true woman's gift of the highest idealizing
power.
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