"Why
don't you take a wife to your bosom yourself?"
"No woman would have me, now that my head looks like an old,
leather-covered trunk," says the bookseller. "And, moreover, there's
my old Stafva, you know."
Stafva was a legendary person in whom nobody believed. She was the
incarnation of the bookseller's unrealised dreams.
"But you, Mr. Potocki?" suggested the schoolmaster.
"He's been married once, that's enough," replies the bookseller.
The Pole nods his head like a metrometer.
"Yes, I was married very happily. Ugh!" he says and finishes his grog.
"Well," continues the schoolmaster, "if women weren't such fools, one
might consider the matter; but they are infernal fools."
The Pole nods again and smiles; being a Pole, he doesn't understand
what the word fool means.
"I have been married very happily, ugh!"
"And then there is the noise of the children, and children's clothes
always drying near the stove; and servants, and all day long the smells
from the kitchen. No, thank you! And, perhaps, sleepless nights into the
bargain."
"Ugh!" added the Pole, completing the sentence.
"Mr. Potocki says 'ugh' with the malice of the bachelor who listens to
the complaints of the married man," remarked the bookseller.
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