The question of wives for these men was a serious one. Girls were growing up within the palisade on the Square Hill, but so were young men. There would be hardly enough brides for all the youths of their own generation, even if every girl found a husband. Aside from the fact that the parents would not like to see their daughters married to strangers of whom they knew nothing, the young folk themselves would be likely to object. Although theoretically, marriages were made by the elders without the girls having anything to say about it, human nature was much the same there as anywhere. In practice, the bride had some choice and the groom some independence. Any woman married against her will can make life so unpleasant for her husband and her husband’s relatives that common sense would lead a parent to avoid such a result. Care was taken to keep a young girl from knowing any men who would be unsuitable. A man did not ask any youth into his house to meet his daughters, on the spur of the moment. He met a great many men at the midday meal which the men ate together, whom he would not think of asking to a family supper. He knew a great many with whom he would not eat at all.
Here and there a soldier found a wife among the country people, but this did not usually turn out very well. The daughters of herdsmen and hut dwellers were not trained in the arts which made a woman dear to a civilized husband. Colonus and his friends wished the wives of the growing settlement to be women who would add to the wealth of their homes and not spoil it,—who would love their homes and their husbands, and bring up their children wisely, and live in peace and friendliness with the other women. The question which had come up was more important now than it might be later. A great deal depended on beginning with the right families. The men now coming in would be the fathers of the future Rome, and on the way in which their sons were brought up the prosperity and godliness of the people might rest.
Another possibility was in sight, and it was too nearly a probability to look very pleasant. The soldiers could get wives across the river among the Rasennae. But that would be a dangerous plan—dangerous perhaps to the men themselves and certainly to the colony. Women of a strange land, of a race so old and strong as the dark people seemed to be—a country where there was a secret council of priests who knew all sorts of things that the people did not—such women, married to settlers in the colony, would be a constant danger. They would learn from their husbands all that went on; they might persuade them to worship the strange gods; they might help to break down defences against the unknown power of the foreign priesthood. That was a plan not to be thought of for a minute.