For two summers he had paid a great deal of attention to a titled lady who owned some property, and his prospects were the general topic, when he suddenly disappeared from high life and became engaged to a poor girl, the daughter of a cooper, who owned no property whatever.
His friends were puzzled and could not understand how he could thus stand in his own light. He had laid his plans so well, he “had but to stretch out his hand and success was in his grasp”; he had the morsel firmly stuck on his fork, it was only necessary for him to open his mouth and swallow it. He himself was at a loss to understand how it was that the face of a little girl whom he had met but once on a steamer could have upset all his plans of many years’ standing. He was bewitched, obsessed.
He asked his friends whether they didn’t think her beautiful?
Frankly speaking they didn’t.
“But she is so clever! Just look into her eyes! What expressive eyes she has!”
His friends could see nothing and hear less, for the girl never opened her lips.
But he spent evening after evening with the cooper’s family; to be sure, the cooper was a very intelligent man! On his knees before her (a trick often practised at the country houses) he held her skeins of wool; he played and sang to her, talked about religion and the drama, and he always read acquiescence in her eyes. He wrote poetry about her, and sacrificed at her shrine his laurels, his ambitious dreams, even his dissertation.
And then he married her.
The cooper drank too much at the wedding and made an improper speech about girls in general. But the son-in-law found the old man so unsophisticated, so amiable, that he egged him on instead of shutting him up. He felt at his ease among these simple folk; in their midst he could be quite himself.
“That’s being in love,” said his friends. “Love is a wonderful thing.”