What happened after, does not belong to this story, and, moreover, it
is difficult to know what goes on behind the convent walls of
domesticity when the vow of silence is being kept.
It was also a fact that the schoolmaster, after his marriage, was never
again seen at a public house.
The bookseller, who met him by himself in the street one evening, had
to listen to a long exhortation on getting married. The schoolmaster
had inveighed against all bachelors; he had called them egotists, who
refused to do their duty by the State; in his opinion they ought to be
heavily taxed, for all indirect taxes weighed most cruelly on the
father of a family. He went so far as to say that he wished to see
bachelorhood punished by the law of the land as a "crime against
nature."
The bookseller had a good memory. He said that he doubted the
advisability of taking a _fool_ into one's house, permanently. But the
schoolmaster replied that _his_ wife was the most intelligent woman he
had ever met.
Two years after the wedding the Pole saw the schoolmaster and his wife
in the theatre; he thought that they looked happy; "ugh!"
Another three years went by. On a Midsummer day the proprietor of the
restaurant made a pleasure trip on the Lake of Malar to Mariafred.
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