I had suspected this for some time, though I pretended to be greatly surprised.
“I have never said anything to her about it,” he continued. “Maybe I never shall, but, ignorant as I am, I can see she is glad to see me when I go there, and she would not invite me back so cordially if she could not tolerate me. It is very pleasant for an ignorant fellow like me to be friends with a refined lady like Mateel. I never thought there was anything in life equal to it. She does not seem to know but that I am of a good family, but I intend to tell her honestly and truly some time what an unfavored fellow I am.”
I said she probably knew all about him already, and was satisfied.
“Do you suppose she does?” he inquired with the look of a pleasant hope in his face. “It would be comforting to know that, as it would be humiliating to tell her everything to my discredit I can think of. But if ever I become convinced that she loves me, I will tell her everything if it kills me.”
He talked as though he had been a great criminal in his time, but there was really nothing more serious against him than that his father was an eccentric shingle-maker, and his mother a midwife, if I except the circumstance that everybody said he came of a shiftless family.
“There seems to be no doubt that I am madly in love,” he repeated again, looking at the flame of his lantern, as though it were likely to give an opinion as to whether he was or not. “I don’t know whether to regard it as a serious circumstance or a pleasant one. They say that one’s first love does not amount to anything, and that one soon forgets it. It will not be that way with me, I am certain. I should be ashamed to offer my affections to another girl after having loved Mateel as madly as I do now, and I should feel that I was offering a poor return for the love I should expect of a wife. I am convinced that a man who has loved but once makes a better husband than one who is in doubt as to whether he ever loved at all. I would as soon marry a widow with children as a woman who has been engaged, and permitted the familiarities which are common under such circumstances. If there is anything in love at all, it is wrong to break an engagement. A man or woman who is so uncertain in matters of the heart as to contract a new fancy four or five times a year, is likely to be mistaken at last. I am not acquainted with many people who are happily married, but I am convinced that plenty of them may be found in looking the world over, and inquiry will no doubt reveal the fact that they were never in love but once. If I should marry, it would seriously affect my happiness to know that another man--I despise a man, anyhow--had caressed and fondled my wife as an accepted lover. I wouldn’t live in the same country with him, and I should be forever unhappy for fear that she loved him the best. It would be a circumstance very much in favor of a happy married life for a man to know that his wife had never seen anyone else she would marry; to know that her lips had touched only his, and that she was innocent as well as virtuous.”