In short my only regret about being married was that we had wasted so much of the glory of youth apart.  Youth is the time for love, but not for marriage!  Some of our friends among the instructors marry on a thousand a year, even in these days of the high cost of living; and I should have been so willing to live as certain of them do—­renting lodgings from a respectable artisan’s wife and doing my own cooking on her stove after she had done hers.

Carl gave me no encouragement, however!  Perhaps it was just as well; for when first engaged I did not know how to cook, though I was a good dancer and could play Liszt’s Polonaise in E flat with but few mistakes.

As it turned out we began our wedded life quite luxuriously.  We had a whole house to ourselves—­and sometimes even a maid!  In those days there were no flats in our town and certain small but shrewd local capitalists had built rows of tiny frame dwellings which they leased to assistant professors, assistant plumbers, and other respectable people of the same financial status, at rates which enabled them—­the owners, not the tenants—­to support charity and religion.

They were all alike—­I refer to the houses now, not to all landlords necessarily—­with a steep stoop in front and a drying yard for Monday mornings in the rear, the kind you see on the factory edges of great cities—­except that ours were cleaner and were occupied by nicer people.

One of our next-door neighbors was a rising young butcher with his bride and the house on the other side of us was occupied by a postman, his progeny, and the piercing notes of his whistle—­presumably a cast-off one—­on which all of his numerous children, irrespective of sex or age, were ambitiously learning their father’s calling, as was made clear through the thin dividing wall, which supplied visual privacy but did not prevent our knowing when they took their baths or in what terms they objected to doing so.  It became a matter of interesting speculation to us what Willie would say the next Saturday night; and if we had quarreled they, in turn, could have—­and would have—­told what it was all about.

“Not every economist,” Carl remarked whimsically, “can learn at first hand how the proletariat lives.”

I, too, was learning at first hand much about my own profession.  My original research in domestic science was sound in theory, but I soon discovered that my dietetic program was too expensive in practice.  Instead of good cuts of beef I had to select second or third quality from the rising young butcher, who, by the way, has since risen to the dignity of a touring car.  Instead of poultry we had pork, for this was before pork also rose.

My courses in bookkeeping, however, proved quite practical; and I may say that I was a good purchasing agent and general manager from the beginning of our partnership, instead of becoming one later through bitter experience, like so many young wives brought up to be ladies, not general houseworkers.