married.  A man with an innate genius for loving and being loved cannot long remain single.  He must marry young; or at least, if he does not marry, he must find a companion, a woman to his heart, a help that is meet for him.  What is commonly called prudence in such concerns is only another name for vice and cruelty.  The purest and best of men necessarily mate themselves before they are twenty.  As a rule, it is the selfish, the mean, the calculating, who wait, as they say, “till they can afford to marry.”  That vile phrase scarcely veils hidden depths of depravity.  A man who is really a man, and who has a genius for loving, must love from the very first, and must feel himself surrounded by those who love him.  ’Tis the first necessity of life to him; bread, meat, raiment, a house, an income, rank far second to that prime want in the good man’s economy.

But Alan Merrick, though an excellent fellow in his way, and of noble fibre, was not quite one of the first, the picked souls of humanity.  He did not count among the finger-posts who point the way that mankind will travel.  Though Herminia always thought him so.  That was her true woman’s gift of the highest idealizing power.  Indeed, it adds, to my mind, to the tragedy of Herminia Barton’s life that the man for whom she risked and lost everything was never quite worthy of her; and that Herminia to the end not once suspected it.  Alan was over thirty, and was still “looking about him.”  That alone, you will admit, is a sufficiently grave condemnation.  That a man should have arrived at the ripe age of thirty and not yet have lighted upon the elect lady—­the woman without whose companionship life would be to him unendurable is in itself a strong proof of much underlying selfishness, or, what comes to the same thing, of a calculating disposition.  The right sort of man doesn’t argue with himself at all on these matters.  He doesn’t say with selfish coldness, “I can’t afford a wife;” or, “If I marry now, I shall ruin my prospects.”  He feels and acts.  He mates, like the birds, because he can’t help himself.  A woman crosses his path who is to him indispensable, a part of himself, the needful complement of his own personality; and without heed or hesitation he takes her to himself, lawfully or unlawfully, because he has need of her.  That is how nature has made us; that is how every man worthy of the name of man has always felt, and thought, and acted.  The worst of all possible and conceivable checks upon population is the vile one which Malthus glossed over as “the prudential,” and which consists in substituting prostitution for marriage through the spring-tide of one’s manhood.