There will therefore be many million marriageable men in Europe if the war ends in 1917.  But they will, for the most part, be of a very tender age indeed, and normal young women between twenty and thirty do not like spring chickens.  They are beloved only by idealess girls of their own age, by a certain type of young women who are alluded to slightingly as “crazy about boys,” possibly either because men of mature years find them uninteresting or because of a certain vampire quality in their natures, and by blasee elderly women who generally foot the bills.

Dr. Talcott Williams pointed out to me not long since that after all great wars, and notably after our own Civil War, there has been a notable increase in the number of marriages in which the preponderance of years was on the wrong side.  Also that it was not until after our own war that the heroine of fiction began to reverse the immemorial procedure and marry a man her inferior in years.  In other words, anything she could get.  This would almost argue that fiction is not only the historian of life but its apologist.

It is quite true that young men coming to maturity during majestic periods of the world’s history are not likely to have the callow brains and petty ideals which distinguished the average youth of peace.  Even boys of fourteen these days talk intelligently of the war and the future.  They read the newspapers, even subscribing for one if at a boarding-school.  In the best of the American universities the men have been alive to the war from the first, and a large proportion of the young Americans who have done gallant service with the American Ambulance Corps had recently graduated when the war broke out.  Others are serving during vacations, and are difficult to lure back to their studies.

Some of the young Europeans of eighteen or twenty will come home from the trenches when peace is declared, and beyond a doubt will compel the love if not the respect of damsels of twenty-five and upward.  But will they care whether they fascinate spinsters of twenty-five and upward, or not?  The fact is not to be overlooked that there will be as many young girls as youths, and as these girls also have matured during their long apprenticeship to sorrow and duty, it is not to be imagined they will fail to interest young warriors of their own age—­nor fail to battle for their rights with every device known to the sex.

Temperament must be taken into consideration, of course, and a certain percentage of men and women of unbalanced ages will be drawn together.  That happens in times of peace.  Moreover it is likely that a large number of young Germans in this country either will conceive it their duty to return to Germany and marry there or import the forlorn in large numbers.  If they have already taken to themselves American wives it is on the cards that they will renounce them also.  There is nothing a German cannot be made to believe is his duty to the Fatherland, and he was brought up not to think.  But if monarchy falls in Germany, and a republic, socialistic or merely democratic, rises on the ruins, then it is more than likely that the superfluous women will be encouraged to transfer themselves and their maidenly dreams to the great dumping-ground of the world.