After all is said, if the young people have an earnest purpose in life it is easy to plan a method of living and to carry it out.  The sacrifices one must make in the house superficially, in the consideration of a certain class, are cheerfully borne and soon forgotten.

Little discomforts which affect only one’s feelings and not one’s health make rather good stories after they are over.  What is worth while?  Are we become too sensitive to little things?  Do we imagine we show our higher civilization by discerning with the little princess the pea under twenty-four feather beds?

Let our shelter be first of all healthful, physically and morally.  If to gain these qualities we must take a house in an unfashionable neighborhood, it should not cause distress.  Why is this particular region unfashionable?  Is it not merely because certain would-be leaders choose to live beyond their means in company with those who are able to spend more?

Why not be honest and happy?  Live within your income and make it cover the truest kind of living.

CHAPTER VIII.

  TO OWN OR TO RENT:  A DIFFICULT QUESTION.

  “Half the sting of poverty is gone when one keeps house for
  one’s own comfort and not for the comment of one’s neighbors.” 
  —­Miss MULOCK.

When the ideals of an older generation are forced upon a younger, already struggling under new and strange environment, the effect is often opposite to that intended.  The elders in their pride of knowledge, and the real-estate promoters in their greed for gain, have been urging the young man to own his house on penalty of shirking his plain duty.  They say he must have a home to offer his bride, as the bird has a nest.  Building-loan associations, homes on the instalment plan, appeal to the sentiments they think the young man ought to heed.

The young man is often modest, almost always sensitive, and he prefers to bear dispraise rather than to tell the real reason he hesitates.  His ear is closer to the ground, he feels even if he cannot express the doubt of the disinterestedness of the land-scheme promoter, of the wisdom of his father.  He knows better than his elders the uncertainties of salaried men, young men with a way to make in the unstable conditions of to-day.

The effect of this well-meant advice is not to hasten his marriage, but to put it off because he is not allowed to take the course he feels safest.  Or if he is willing, the parents of his prospective bride are not, and so young people do not marry on $1000 a year, for fear of the elder generation and their supposed wisdom.

The young people are not justified by present-day conditions in owning a house on an income of $2000 a year unless

(1) They have money to put into it which it will not cripple them for life to lose;

(2) They care so much for the idea of ownership that they are willing to take the risk of losing one half the investment should they be compelled to move;