“Hum,” responded the physician. He fixed his eyes on the mantel and asked abstractedly, “How do you bear the separation?”
“Oh!” Richling laughed, “not very heroically. It’s a great strain on a man’s philosophy.”
“Work is the only antidote,” said the Doctor, not moving his eyes.
“Yes, so I find it,” answered the other. “It’s bearable enough while one is working like mad; but sooner or later one must sit down to meals, or lie down to rest, you know”—
“Then it hurts,” said the Doctor.
“It’s a lively discipline,” mused Richling.
“Do you think you learn anything by it?” asked the other, turning his eyes slowly upon him. “That’s what it means, you notice.”
“Yes, I do,” replied Richling, smiling; “I learn the very thing I suppose you’re thinking of,—that separation isn’t disruption, and that no pair of true lovers are quite fitted out for marriage until they can bear separation if they must.”
“Yes,” responded the physician; “if they can muster the good sense to see that they’ll not be so apt to marry prematurely. I needn’t tell you I believe in marrying for love; but these needs-must marriages are so ineffably silly. You ‘must’ and you ‘will’ marry, and ‘nobody shall hinder you!’ And you do it! And in three or four or six months”—he drew in his long legs energetically from the hearth-pan—“death separates you!—death, sometimes, resulting directly from the turn your haste has given to events! Now, where is your ‘must’ and ‘will’?” He stretched his legs out again, and laid his head on his cushioned chair-back.
“I have made a narrow escape,” said Richling.