"No, no!" I cried, with the cocksure assertiveness of my years.
"But yes!"
"Not I! No, no, Arnold—, 'needles and pins, needles and pins'—"
"When a man marries his trouble begins?" Sadness now shadowed Arnold's expressive face. "No! Proverbs sometimes are pernicious."
"You are laughing at me!"
I had detected, through the veil of melancholy that seemed to have fallen over him, a faint ray of something akin to humor.
"I am not laughing at you, Joe." His voice was sad. "You will marry some day—marry and settle down. It is good to do so. I—"
There was something in his stopping that made me look at him in wonder. Immediately he was himself again, calm, wise, taciturn; but in spite of my youth I instinctively felt that only by suffering could a man win his way to such kindly, quiet dignity.
I had said that I would not marry: no wonder, I have since thought, that Arnold looked at me with that gentle humor. Never dreaming that in only a few short months a new name and a new face were to fill my mind and my heart with a world of new anxieties and sorrows and joys, never dreaming of the strange and distant adventures through which Arnold and I were to pass,—if a fortune-teller had foretold the story, I should have laughed it to scorn,—I was only angry at his amused smile. Perhaps I had expected him to argue with me, to try to correct my notions. In any case, when he so kindly and yet keenly appraised at its true worth my boyish pose, I was sobered for a moment by the sadness that he himself had revealed; then I all but flew into a temper.
"Oh, very well! Go on and laugh at me. You were laughing at me the other night when I was fencing, too. I saw you. I'd like to see you do better yourself. Go on and laugh, you who are so wise."