"Nevertheless," repeated the widow, "is was lucky—for the girl."
"Which girl?" asked the bachelor. "The girl I broke off with or the girl that came afterward?"
"I suppose," mused the widow, ignoring the levity and leaning over to arrange a bunch of violets at her belt, "that is why it is so difficult for a man to keep a promise or a vow—even a marriage vow."
"Oh, I don't know." The bachelor leaned back and regarded the widow's coronet braid through the smoke from his cigar. "It isn't the marriage vows that are so difficult to keep. It's the fool vows a man makes before marriage and the fool promises he makes afterward that he stumbles over and falls down on. The marriage vows are so big and vague that you can get all around them without actually breaking them, but if they should interpolate concrete questions into the service such as, 'Do you, William, promise not to growl at the coffee'——"
"Or 'Do you, Mary, promise never to put a daub of powder on your nose again?'" broke in the widow.
"Nor to look twice at your pretty stenographer," continued the bachelor.
"Nor to lie about your age, or your foot or your waist measure."
"Nor to juggle with the truth whenever you stay out after half past ten."
"Nor to listen to things that—that anybody—except your husband—may say to you in the conservatory—oh, I see how it feels!" finished the widow with a sympathetic little shudder.
"And yet," reflected the bachelor, "a woman is always exacting vows and promises from the man she loves, always putting up bars—for him to jump over; when if she would only leave him alone he would be perfectly contented to stay within bounds and graze in his own pasture. A man hates being pinned down; but a woman doesn't want anything around that she can't pin down, from her belt and her theories to her hat and her husband."