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.”
“Well, but, Potts,” inquired Sturgis, with interest, “how could Goethe have gone to work, for instance, to disgust Frederica with him?”
“Depends on the kind of girl. If she is one of your high-steppers as to dignity and sense of honor, let him play mean and seem to do a few dirty tricks. If she's a stickler for manners and good taste, let him betray a few traits of boorishness or Philistinism; or if she has a keen sense of the ridiculous, let him make an ass of himself. I should say the last would be the surest cure and leave least of a sore place in her feelings, but it would be hardest on his vanity. Everybody knows that a man would 'rather seem a scamp than a fool.'”
“I don't believe there's a man in the world who would play the voluntary fool to save any woman's heart from breaking, though he might manage the scamp,” remarked Mathewson. “And anyhow, Potts, I believe there 's no girl who would n't choose to be jilted outright, rather than be juggled out of her affections that way.”
“No doubt she would say so, if you asked her,” replied the imperturbable Potts. “A woman always prefers a nice sentimental sorrow to a fancy-free state. But it isn't best for her, and looking out for her good, you must deprive her of it. Women are like children, you know, our natural wards.”
This last sentiment impressed these beardless youths as a clincher, and there was a pause. But Mathewson, who was rather strong on the moralities, rallied with the objection that Potts's plan would be deceit.
“Well, now, that's what I call cheeky,” replied its author, with a drawl of astonishment. “I suppose it wasn't deceit when you were prancing around in your best clothes both literally and figuratively, trying to bring your good points into such absurd prominence as to delude her into the idea that you had no bad ones. Oh, no, it's only deceit when you appear worse than you are, not when you try to appear better. Strikes me that when you 'ye got a girl into a fix, it won't do at that time of day to plead your conscience as a reason for not getting her out of it. Seeing that a man is generally ready to sacrifice his character in reality to his own interests, he ought to be willing to sacrifice it in appearance to another's.”