My final advice is that the sensible young couple both of whom agree about essentials, and who are willing and glad to work together for a common end, and who love nature and gardening and believe in family life so strongly as not to miss the crowd and theatres, may safely start a home in the country with a garden, and pets for the children, if they have a reasonable prospect of ten years in one spot.  Let them make the place attractive for some family, even if they have to leave it.

The women of this group will, I believe, have the qualities Mr. Wells predicts:  not only intelligence and education, but a reasonableness and reliability not always found to-day.

Unless a reasonable prospect of ten years’ occupancy is assured, then begin life in a rented house, not necessarily in a flat.  Begin with a few things of your own some which have been yours for years, some which you have bought together and which have a meaning for one of you and are not irritating to the other.

Devote a part of your leisure to a critical study of the house you would like, draw plans, make sketches in color, study color effects, learn about fabrics, collect them for the future.  You will find an amusing and instructive occupation.

The essential point is to begin this life on two thirds of what you have reason to expect as the year’s income; keep the rest invested or in the bank.  There are to-day many temptations to spend for things attractive in themselves but not necessary to the effective life.  If friends are so silly as to rally you on living in an unfashionable quarter, ask them in to see your sketches and plans, and talk them into enthusiasm over the idea.  Do missionary work with them rather than be ridiculed out of your convictions.  It sometimes seems as if young people had no convictions, as if they drifted with the wind of newspaper suggestion.  So do not allow your friends to drive you to greater expense than you have determined upon, lest the end of the first two years of life find you in debt with no fair start for the baby, whose life should begin in an atmosphere of quiet assurance that all is well.  It is not impossible that the nervous irritability and recklessness of many are due to the atmosphere of childhood.  Then remember that the welfare and security of the child is the watchword of the future.

A FEW BOOKS.

Anticipations.  H.G.  Wells.

Mankind in the Making.  H.G.  Wells.  Scribners.

A Modern Utopia.  H.G.  Wells.  Scribners.

Twentieth-century Inventions:  a Forecast.  Geo. Sutherland. 
   Longmans, Green, & Co.

The Level of Social Motion.  Michael Lane.  Macmillan.

The Theory of the Leisure Class.  Thorstein Veblen.  Macmillan.

The Woman who Spends.  Whitcomb and Barrows.

Physical Deterioration:  Its Causes and their Cure.  A. Watt Smyth. 
   E.P.  Dutton.