"Well, at any rate you can take it when it comes," he reminded me. "There won't be anybody to be hurt by your good times but yourself."
"Jerry, is it as bad as ever?"
"So bad that if she doesn't let up on it soon I shall do something to bring on a crisis."
"And spend the rest of your life regretting it. Besides there is Miss Doran; you'd have to think of her." Miss Doran was a dancer with a spirit in her feet and a South Jersey accent, whose effect on him Jerry was translating into quite the best thing he had done. It wasn't, however, that I cared in the least what became of her that I had thrown out that saving suggestion, but because it had been little more than a year since Jerry had disturbed the peace and broken the——not heart——let us say the organ of her literary ineptitudes—of Mineola Maxon Freear who had interviewed him once, and taken him with the snare of a superior comprehension. Mineola had advanced ideas as to the relation of the sexes, and a conviction that she was fitted to be the mentor of a literary career, and had missed the point of Jerry's philanderings quite as much as his wife missed them. With Mineola in mind and the tragedy she came near making out of it for herself, I ventured on a word of caution.
"You don't want to forget, Jerry, that there's one good thing about your marriage; it keeps you from making another one just like it."
"You think I'd do that?"
"It is written in your forehead, Jerry, that you are to be attracted to the sort of woman whom you have the least use for. The kind that would make you a good wife, you couldn't possibly love well enough to live with her."
"I could live with you," he affirmed.
"Then it would be because you have never been in love with me. Look here, Jerry, what does the other all amount to? If you didn't have any one ... like Miss Doran, I mean ... do you mean that you wouldn't write plays at all?"
"I'd write them harder and I'd write them different. How can a man tell? This thing is. Once you know it is to be had, you just can't hold back from it."