Mary felt she would wait for John even if, instead of going away
on a career, he were going away on a comet.
She waited for him from the time she was twenty-two to the time
she was twenty-six, and would have waited longer if she hadn't
got angry and insisted on marrying him.
Into why she waited, and why she wouldn't wait any longer, chance
put most of the simple plot of the commonplace modern drama,
"Love Deferred." It is so commonplace that it is doubtful if any
other drama can so stretch the nerves or can so draw from them a
thin, high note of fine pain.
We will pretend that John was a doctor. No, that's too
professional. He was a civil engineer. That's professional enough
and more commercial. It combines Technique and Business, which
are the two big elements in the life of Modern Man.
When they got engaged, Mary was through college, but John had one
more year to go in engineering school.
How the preparation for life does lengthen itself out!
When Judge Story was professor at Harvard in the thirties of the
last century, he put the law into his pupils' heads in eighteen
months. The present professors require three years.
In 1870 the Harvard Medical School made you attend classes for
four months in each of three years. It now makes you do it for
nine months in each of four years.
As for engineering, the University of Wisconsin gave John a chill
by informing him in its catalogue that "it is coming to be
generally recognized that a four-year technical course following
the high-school course is not an adequate preparation for those
who are to fill important positions; and the University would
urge all those who can afford the time to extend their studies
over a period of five or six years."
John compromised on five. This gave him a few Business courses in
the College of Commerce in addition to his regular Technique
courses in the College of Engineering. He was now a Bachelor of
Science.
He thereupon became an apprentice in the shops of one of the two
biggest electrical firms in the United States. He inspected the
assembling of machines before they were shipped, and he overheard
wisdom from foremen and superintendents. His salary was fifteen
cents an hour. Since he worked about ten hours a day, his total
income was about forty dollars a month. At the end of the year he
was raised to fifty. This was the normal raise for a Bachelor of
Science.
The graduates of Yale and Harvard in the bright colonial days of
those institutions married almost immediately on graduation. John
didn't. He didn't get married so early nor become a widower so
often. He didn't carry so many children to the christening font
nor so many to the cemetery.
Look at the dark as well as the bright side of colonial days.
Pick out any of the early Harvard classes. Honestly and truly at
random, run your finger down the column and pick any class. The
class of 1671!
It had eleven graduates. One of them remained a bachelor. Don't
be too severe on him. He died at twenty-four. Of the remaining
ten, four were married twice and two were married three times.
For ten husbands, therefore, there were eighteen wives.
Mr. G. Stanley Hall, President of Clark University, very
competently remarks: "The problem of superfluous women did not
exist in those days. They were all needed to bring up another
woman's children."
The ten husbands of the Harvard class of 1671, with their
eighteen wives, had seventy-one children. They did replenish the
earth. They also filled the churchyards.