Another statement, similarly obtained, concerns a colored couple, married about two years and with two children, the youngest less than a month old.  Man had been out of work and family had gone to live with relatives.

    (1) Man earns $20 a week but refuses to start housekeeping again,
    although they are seriously overcrowded—­seven adults and five
    children in five rooms.

    (2) Woman says he makes her sleep on chairs so that he can get
    better rest.

    (3) He is seeing a good deal of another woman, a friend of the wife
    (wife’s statement only).

    (4) Woman had applied for nursery care for both children so that she
    might go to work.

    (5) It transpires that she lived with him before marriage, and that
    the first child was a month old when the marriage took place.  He
    “holds it over her.”

    (6) Man had been married before and divorced.

    (7) The family’s habits of recreation are changed; the man no longer
    “takes her out.”

Such attempts to foretell the future are not infallible, of course; but a listing process is a valuable aid to diagnosis, and, by its help, a situation may be uncovered which tends toward complete family breakdown.  This may be taken in time and prevented; or, if separation is inevitable it can be prepared for in advance, the necessary legal arrangements can be made to protect the family, and the anxiety, suspense, and useless effort avoided which a sudden and downright abandonment would cause.

But the trouble is that the problem seldom comes to the case worker until matters have progressed farther than this.  The real question is—­not how to recognize pre-desertion symptoms, but how to get hold of families when these symptoms are in the incipient stage.

Mr. Hiram Myers, manager of the Desertion Bureau of the New York Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor, who has made a close study of the subject, holds the theory that the real period of stress in marital adjustment comes not during the “critical first year,” about which we have been told so much, but at a later period, which he sets roughly at from the third to the fifth year after marriage.  By this time there are usually one or two babies, the wife’s girlish charm has gone, and the romance of the first attraction has vanished, while the steady force of conjugal affection which should smooth their path through the years ahead has not come to take its place.  It is in this middle period that longings for the delights of his care-free youth begin to come back to a man; if he ever had the wandering foot, it begins again to twitch for the road; of else his fancy is captured by some other girl not tied down at home by children.  It is at this time, too, that endless discords and misunderstandings arise—­that the last bit of gilt crumbles off the gingerbread.