“I was out to dinner with Jack last night. You couldn’t look at him and doubt such a thing as love, yet Marie was always a little tyrant. It made me wonder, after all, what kind of a wife made a man happiest.”
“I can tell you, a dead one.”
“Honestly I believe he would have gone stark mad if he hadn’t won her. He worships her.”
“He’d have come out without a scratch. My observation is that a man can get over not getting a girl easier than he can get over getting her.”
“I believe in marriage—it’s the only decent way to live, but I wouldn’t care for my wife the way he does; my regard wouldn’t have that self-sacrifice in it. I’d want a woman to minister to my comfort, put mustard plasters on me when I was sick.”
“But the wife. What would she get in return?”
“My name, for the sake of which I would sacrifice the most precious gift that could come into a man’s life—a woman whom I could have loved and by whom I could have been loved.”
“A pretty theory, but, ye gods! the practice.” Briarley laid down his napkin and leaned back from the table, staring at the other contemplatively.
“Andrews, for a man of your logic, you are confoundedly disappointing. I’d have thought you’d have very fantastic ideals of marriage—of the woman that was to make your home. You claim that your philosophy is in straight lines. There are two ways of making a straight line, horizontal and perpendicular, then they cross. You think it is infamous to marry for money, and you have tabooed your pet hobby,” he said with an ironical curl of the lip. “Five years ago, before you had got your bearings, you might have humored such a whimsical freak of that individuality of yours, but now you would struggle devilishly before you would spoil your life.”
“I have theories, not just to talk about, but to live by. My philosophy is extraordinarily simple. You can’t have the pie and eat it too.”