"Why, in the first place," said he, "I shall read or write. But my first employment shall be to teach you Spanish. I cannot endure to think that De Walden taught you Italian, Helen." "But you taught me to love, you know, therefore you ought to forgive it." "No, I cannot rest till I also have helped to complete your education." "Well, but I cannot be learning Spanish all day." "No; so perhaps I shall set about writing a great work." "The very thing that I was going to propose, though not exactly a great work. What think you of a life of poor Chatterton, with critical remarks on his poems?" "Excellent! I will do it." And now having given him a pursuit, I ventured to indulge some reasonable hopes that home and the country might prove to him as delightful as he fancied that they would be; and what with studying Spanish, with building a green-house, with occasional writing, with study, with getting together materials for this life, and writing the preface, time fled on very rapid pinions; and after we had been married two years, and May arrived a second time, Seymour triumphantly exclaimed, "There, Helen! I believe that you distrusted my love for the country; but have I once expressed or felt a wish to go to London?" "The ides of March are come, but not gone," I replied; "and surely if I wish to go, you will not deny me." "No, Helen, certainly not," said he in a tone of mortification; "if I am no longer all-sufficient for your happiness." Alas! in the ingenuousness of my nature, I gave way when he said this to the tenderness of my heart, and assured him that my happiness depended wholly on the enjoyment of his society; and I fear it is too true that men soon learn to slight what they are sure of possessing. Had I been an artful woman, and could I have condescended to make him doubtful of the extent of my love, by a few woman's subterfuges; could I have feigned a desire to return to the world, instead of owning, as I did, that all my enjoyment was comprised in home and him; I do think that I might have been for a much longer period the happiest of wives; but then I should have been, in my own eyes, despicable as a woman, and I was always tenacious of my own esteem. May was come, but not gone--when I found my husband was continually reading to me, after having previously read to himself, the accounts in the papers of the gaieties of London. "What a tempting account this is, Helen, of the Exhibition at Somerset House!--I should like to see it. Seeing pictures is an elegant rational amusement. And here are soon to be a ball and supper at Ranelagh. A fine place Ranelagh for such an entertainment." Here he read a list of routs and cotillion balls at different places; but one day he read, with infinite mortification, that our uncle, Mr. Pendarves, had given a ball on the return of his son-in-law to Parliament. "How abominable," cried Seymour, "for my uncle to give a ball, and not invite us to go up to it!"