After the engagement, the quarrel. It lasted all the way up the
schoolhouse lane.
"I _do_ care for you, I do, really."
"You don't know what you're talking about. You may care for me as a child
cares. You don't care as a woman does. No woman who cared for a man would
write the letters you do. I ask you to tell me about yourself--what
you're feeling and thinking--and you send me some ghastly screed about
Spinoza or Kant. Do you suppose any man wants to hear what his sweetheart
thinks about Space and Time and the Ding-an-sich?"
"You used to like it."
"I don't like it now. No woman would wear those horrible clothes if she
cared for a man and wanted him to care for her. She wouldn't cut her hair
off."
"How was I to know you'd mind so awfully? And how do you know what women
do or don't do?"
"Has it never occurred to you that I might know more women than you know
men? That I might have women friends?"
"I don't think I've thought about it very much."
"Haven't you? Men don't live to be thirty-seven without getting to know
women; they can't go about the world without meeting them.... There's a
little girl down in Sussex. A dear little girl. She's everything a man
wants a woman to be."
"Lots of hair?"
"Lots of hair. Stacks of it. And she's clever. She can cook and sew and
make her own clothes and her sisters'. She's kept her father's house
since she was fifteen. Without a servant."
"How awful for her. And you like her?"
"Yes, Mary."
"I'm glad you like her. Who else?"
"A Frenchwoman in Paris. And a German woman in Hamburg. And an
Englishwoman in London; the cleverest woman I know. She's unhappy, Mary.
Her husband behaves to her like a perfect brute."
"Poor thing. I hope you're nice to her."
"She thinks I am."
Silence. He peered into her face.
"Are you jealous of her, Mary?"
"I'm not jealous of any of them. You can marry them all if you want to."
"I was going to marry one of them."
"Then why didn't you?"
"Because the little girl in Essex wouldn't let me."
"Little beast!"
"So you're jealous of _her_, are you? You needn't be. She's gone. She
tried to swallow the _Kritik der reinen Vernunft_ and it disagreed with
her and she died.
"'Nur einmal doch mächt' ich dich sehen,
Und sinken vor dir auf's Knie,
Und sterbend zu dir sprechen,
Madam, ich liebe Sie!'"
"What's that? Oh, what's that?"
"_That_--Madam--is Heine."