If all these obstacles to early marriage could be overcome, the question of the wisest time for marrying might be approached fairly and squarely on its merits.

Too early marriage means immaturity in choice, with the possibility always of unfortunate mistakes and sad awakening.  Too late marriage, on the other hand, means settled convictions which often result in that incompatibility which seeks relief in divorce.  The plasticity of youth at least promises adaptability.  The mature judgment of later years ought to afford a wise choice.  Between extreme youth then and a too settled maturity is the wise time.

In order to approach the ideal in the marriage relation, the time of marriage should be so placed that the girl is (1) physically fit, (2) fully educated, (3) broadened by some experience with the world.

She must not be too old to bear children safely, or to rear them sympathetically as they approach the difficult years.  She must not be physically worn by excessive industrial service, nor with enthusiasms burned out by the same cause.  Probably between twenty-two and twenty-five the girl reaches the height of physical fitness.  She may also by that time have completed a liberal education, and she may even have done that and also have put her training to useful service.  It would be better if girls completed their college courses earlier than most do.  However, since the great majority of girls do not have a college education, the generally increased age of marriage cannot rightfully be laid, as many seem to lay it, at the doors of the college women.  Schemes of education in the future will undoubtedly try to remedy the defect of present systems in this respect.  If most girls could finish their training in college or professional school at twenty, as some do now, the world would be rewarded by earlier marriages and probably more of them.  There would be more children, reared by younger and more enthusiastic mothers.  The more difficult professions, which could not be successfully undertaken by the girl of twenty, would then be reserved, as they generally are now, for the women whose ambition is unusually strong and absorbing.  Attempts are frequently made to show that ambition is becoming an inordinately prominent quality in all women, but there are few facts to support so wide a contention.

[Illustration:  Photograph by Paul Thompson RUTH MCENERY STUART Mrs. Stuart was one of those in whom the talent for homemaking and the talent for creative literary work existed side by side.  On her husband’s plantation in Arkansas she found many of the types for the characters in her stories]

The girl graduate of twenty, reinforced by from two to five years of work in the vocation she has chosen, is usually fit, physically and mentally, for marriage.  More than that, she may by that age, usually, be trusted to know what she wants, even in a husband, if she is ever going to know.