“Martin Arrowsmith, if you think for one moment that I’m ever going to marry a vulgar, crude, selfish, microbe-grubbing smart aleck—”
“And if you think I’m going to marry a dame that keeps nag-nag-naggin’ and jab-jab-jabbin’ at me all day long—”
They hurt each other; they had pleasure in it; and they parted forever, twice they parted forever, the second time very rudely, near a fraternity-house where students were singing heart-breaking summer songs to a banjo.
In ten days, without seeing her again, he was off with Clif to the North Woods, and in his sorrow of losing her, his longing for her soft flesh and for her willingness to listen to him, he was only a little excited that he should have led the class in bacteriology, and that Max Gottlieb should have appointed him undergraduate assistant for the coming year.
CHAPTER VI
I
The waiters at Nokomis Lodge, among the Ontario pines, were all of them university students. They were not supposed to appear at the Lodge dances—they merely appeared, and took the prettiest girls away from the elderly and denunciatory suitors in white flannels. They had to work but seven hours a day. The rest of the time they fished, swam, and tramped the shadowy trails, and Martin came back to Mohalis placid—and enormously in love with Madeline.
They had written to each other, politely, regretfully, and once a fortnight; then passionately and daily. For the summer she had been dragged to her home town, near the Ohio border of Winnemac, a town larger than Martin’s native Elk Mills but more sun-baked, more barren with little factories. She sighed, in a huge loose script dashing all over the page:
Perhaps we shall never see each other again but I do want you to know how much I prize all the talks we had together about science & ideals & education, etc.— I certainly appreciate them here when I listen to these stick in the muds going on, oh, it is too dreadful, about their automobiles & how much they have to pay their maids and so on & so forth. You gave me so much but I did give you something didn’t I? I can’t always be in the wrong can I?
“My dear, my little girl!” he lamented. “‘Can’t always be in the wrong’! You poor kid, you poor dear kid!”