 Ultimately, the dual obstacles of his still-questionable health and finances caused him to abandon his university ambitions and instead take a job with his father's paper.In 1896, he met Grace Hartley, a well-off twenty-year-old who was on vacation with her mother at one of Saratoga's sanitariums.Though she was initially unimpressed with him, Howe courted her assiduously for two years, and the couple became engaged in 1898, marrying the following year.