The details of a dinner or a social company at the fireside become the topics for the gossip of strangers.

I sometimes think that the young people of the present day lose much of the romance that used to belong to the halcyon period of courtship.

In the somewhat primitive days of my youth, young lovers kept their own secrets, and were startled if their heart affairs were on other people's tongues; but now-a-days marriage engagements are matters of public announcement--not infrequently in the columns of a newspaper! It seems to be forgotten that an engagement to marry may not always end in a marriage.

The usage of crowned heads abroad is no warrant for the new fashion, for royalty has no privacies, and queens and empresses choose their own husbands--a prerogative that the stoutest champion of woman's rights has not yet had the hardihood to advocate.
It has always required--but never more than now--no small amount of moral courage on the part of newly married couples, whose incomes are moderate, to resist the temptations of extravagant living.

As the heads of young men are often turned by the reports of great fortunes suddenly acquired, so the ambition seizes upon many a young wife to cut a figure in "society." Instead of "the household--motions light and free" that Wordsworth describes, the handmaid of fashion leads the hollow life of "keeping up appearances." If nothing worse than the slavery of debt is incurred, home life becomes a counterfeit of happiness; but any one who watches the daily papers will sometimes see obituaries there more saddening than those which appear under the head of "Deaths," it is the list of detected defaulters or peculators or swindlers of some description--often belonging to the most respectable families.