“But, man,” said Sturgis, “he didn't want to marry her, and seeing he didn't, nothing could have been crueler to her, to say nothing of himself, than to have done so.”
“Well, then,” said Mathewson, “why did he go and get her in love with him?”
“Why, he took his risk and she hers, for the fun of the game. She happened to be the one who paid for it, but it might just as well have been he. Why, Mat, you must see yourself that for Goethe to have married then would have knocked his art-life into a cocked hat. Your artist has just two great foes,--laziness and matrimony. Each has slain its thousands. Hitch Pegasus to a family cart and he can't go off the thoroughfare. He must stick to the ruts. I admit that a bad husband may be a great artist; but for a good husband, an uxorious, contented husband, there's no chance at all.”
“You are neither of you right, as usual,” said little Potts, in his oracular way.
When Potts first came to college, the fellows used to make no end of fun of the air of superior and conclusive wisdom with which he assumed to lay down the law on every question, this being the more laughable because he was such a little chap. Potts did not pay the least attention to the jeers, and finally the jeerers were constrained to admit that if he did have an absurdly pretentious way of talking, his talk was unusually well worth listening to, and the result was that they took him at his own valuation, and, for the sake of hearing what he had to say, quietly submitted to his assumption of authority as court of appeal. So when he coolly declared both disputants wrong, they manifested no resentment, but only an interest as to what he was going to say, while the other fellows also looked up curiously.
“It would have been a big mistake for Goethe to have married her,” pursued Potts, in his deliberate monotone, “but he was n't justified on that account in breaking her heart. It was his business, having got her in love with him, to get her out again and leave her where she was.”
“Get her out again?” demanded Mathewson. “How was he to do that?”
“Humph!” grunted Potts. “If you have n't found it much easier to lose a friend than to win one, you 're luckier than most. If you asked me how he was to get her in love with him, I should have to scratch my head, but the other thing is as easy as unraveling a stocking.”