“Oh hell!” he said roughly. “She’s older than that. She’s five or six years older than you. What do you want to get married for anyhow? You’re just a kid yet. Everything’s before you. You’re only now getting a start. Now you want to go and tie yourself up so you can’t move!”
He ambled over to the window and stared out. Then he sank comfortably into one of my chairs, while I uttered some fine romantic bosh about love, a home, not wanting to wander around the world all my days alone. As I talked he contemplated me with one of those audacious smirky leers of his, as irritating and disconcerting an expression as I have seen on any face.
“Oh hell, Theodore!” he remarked finally, as if to sweep away all I had said. Then after a time he added, as if addressing the world in general: “If there’s a bigger damn fool than a young newspaper man in or out of love, let me know. Here you are, just twenty-one, just starting out. You come down here from Chicago and get a little start, and the first thing you want to do is to load yourself up with a wife, and in a year or so two or three kids. Now I know damned well,” he went on, no doubt noting the look of easy toleration on my part, “that what I’m going to say won’t make you like me any better, but I’m going to say it anyhow. You’re like all these young newspaper scouts: the moment you get a start you think you know it all. Well, Theodore, you’ve got a long time to live and a lot of things to learn. I had something to do with getting you into this game, and that’s the only reason I’m talking to you now. I’d like to see you go on and not make a mistake. In the first place you’re too young to get married, and in the second, as I said before, that girl is five years older than you if she’s a day. I think she’s older,” and he went over and re-examined the picture, while I spluttered, insisting that he was crazy, that she was no more than two years older if so much. “Along with this,” he went on, completely ignoring my remarks, “she’s one of these middle-West girls, all right for life out here but no good for the newspaper game or you. I’ve been through all that myself. Just remember, my boy, that I’m ten years older than you. She belongs to some church, I suppose?”
“Methodist,” I replied ruefully.
“I knew it! But I’m not knocking her; I’m not saying that she isn’t pretty and virtuous, but I do say that she’s older than you, and narrow. Why, man, you don’t know your own mind yet. You don’t know where you’ll want to go or what you’ll want to do. In ten years from now you’ll be thirty-two, and she’ll be thirty-seven or more, believing and feeling things that will make you tired. You’ll never agree with her—or if you do, so much the worse for you. What she wants is a home and children and a steady provider, and what you really want is freedom to go and do as you please, only you don’t know it.
“Now I’ve watched you, Theodore, and I hear what people down here say about you, and I think you have something ahead of you if you don’t make a fool of yourself. But if you marry now—and a conventional and narrow woman at that, one older than you—you’re gone. She’ll cause you endless trouble. In three or four years you’ll have children, and you’ll get a worried, irritated point of view. Take my advice. Run with girls if you want to, but don’t marry. Now I’ve said my say, and you can do as you damned please.”
He smirked genially and condescendingly once more, and I felt very much impressed and put down. After all, I feared, in spite of my slushy mood, that what he said was true, that it would be best for me to devote myself solely to work and study and let women alone. But also I knew that I couldn’t.
The next time my beloved came to the city I decided to sound her on the likelihood of my changing, differing. We were walking along a leaf-strewn street, the red, brown, yellow and green leaves thick on the brick walk, of a gray November afternoon.
“And what would you do then?” I asked, referring to my fear of changing, not caring for her any longer.
She meditated for a while, kicking the leaves and staring at the ground without looking up. Finally she surveyed me with clear appealing blue-gray eyes.