I. If you will not be amiable toward me, I must cease to love you.
She. That is of no consequence. I can go my own way by myself.
I. So can I.
She. Good-by, then, sir.
I. Good-by, Miss A.
"Thank Heaven, it was not too late!" thought I to myself, as, after my dismissal, I hastened to my little farm in the country. Although this abrupt termination of my second love affair caused but little pain to my heart, I felt considerable mortification, and a secret hostility sprung up in my soul toward the whole female sex. It happened, however, very luckily for me, that while I remained in this state of mind I met with one of my neighbors who was precisely in the same condition. He had been for some time divorced from a wife with whom he had lived very unhappily, and he drove about in his sulky, upon which he had had a motto inscribed in golden letters:
"It is better to be alone than to be ill-accompanied."
The sentiment struck me as very excellent; and my neighbor and I often met, and agreed admirably in our abuse of the ladies. In the mean time, I occupied myself with books and agriculture.
I have a great esteem for books, and I bow myself to the dust before learning, but, I know not how it is, further than that I can not go; esteem and veneration I feel, but assuredly my affections never grew in that soil. My love for agriculture took me forth into Nature, and Nature is lovely. But Adam was uneasy in Paradise, and did not wake to life and happiness until Eve came; and I, who did not possess a paradise, found myself very lonely and melancholy at "Stenbacke." Trees, after all, are wooden and dull things, when we crave for human sympathies; and echo, the voice of the rocks, is the most wearisome voice I know. No! heart to heart, eye to eye, that is the life; and to live together, a happy and healthy rural life, to work for the happiness of those who depend upon us—to regulate the home, to live, to think, to love, to rejoice together. Ah! "my wife" still stood vividly before my imagination.
My experience in the realms of love had, however, made me suspicious. I feared that I could never be happy, according to my ideas of happiness, which my neighbor-friend characterized as "reposing in the shade of a pair of slippers." I was in low spirits; and accordingly, one day, after having finished the last of six dozen of cigars, and quarreled with my neighbor, who bored me with his everlasting and doleful tirades against the ladies, I set off in my own sulky to amuse myself by a drive.