Marrying for shelter is and should be no longer necessary; and as for the fear that this habit of bachelor quarters will be hard to break up and tend to delay marriage, it will all depend upon whether it comes from the merely animal layer of the brain or from the intellectual.

This housing of the individual instead of the family has introduced an entirely new problem into house-building.

Formerly when a widow or widower, a maiden aunt, a homeless uncle or cousin made his home with relatives, it was “as one of the family”; only the minister was recognized as having need for a separate sitting-room.  The trials of this forced companionship have been told in many a witty story; and pathetic instances that never came to print are matters of common knowledge.

Will any one dare question the fact that the sum of human happiness has been increased by the freedom given to these prisoned souls by the small independent apartment?

I have been reminded that here is no provision for the different generations to live together under the same roof; that the nineteenth century held it to be of great social value to have the children grow up with the elders.  I am sorry for the twentieth-century grandparents if they are obliged to live in a flat with the twentieth-century child; some readjustment of manners and ideals must be made before such living will be comfortable, and it seems as if they are better apart until the new order is accepted or modified.  The comfort of those whose work is done and who have leisure to enjoy life was never so easily secured as to-day.  To turn the key and take the train at an hour’s notice, leaving no cares to follow, tends to a serene old age.

Moralists may squabble over the discipline of living with one’s mother-in-law, and of the loss to the children of grandmother’s petting, but at least physical content and mental satisfaction have increased.  Has selfishness also?  Who shall say?  And anyway it is a part of the progress of the age, and what are we to do about it?

For one group of single persons the change has been only beneficial.  It was a strict code of the early nineteenth century that a single woman should find shelter under the roof of some family house, however independent, financially, her condition.  Latch-key privileges were denied her.  Result, the boarding-house of the later half of the century, nominally a family home, actually a hotbed of faultfinding and gossip, most wearing to the teacher and fledgling professional woman, however acceptable to the milliner and seamstress.  Privacy could not be maintained in a house built for a family of five made to do duty for twelve, with one bath-room, thin-walled bedrooms with connecting doors through which the light streamed when one wished to sleep, and words frequently came not intended for outsiders.  Who that has experienced the two could ever think the bachelor apartment with its neat bath-room and double-doored entrance an objectionable feature in modern intellectual life?  Ah! here is the key.  We are to-day living a life of the intellect far more than ever before, and for that a certain amount of withdrawal from our fellow man is needed, at least a withdrawal from that portion which finds its interest in the affairs of others.