Read "Mabel and I. (a Philosophical Fairy Tale.)" by Hjalmar Hjorth Boysen online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
It was a little after ten, I think, when I left the professor's house, where I had been spending the evening, and started on my homeward way.
As I walked along the road the thought of Mabel haunted me. I wondered whether I ever should be a professor, like her father, and ended with concluding that the next best thing to being one's self a professor would be to be a professor's son-in-law. But, somehow, I wasn't at all sure that Mabel cared anything about me.