—She has no other, and hopes you’ll not raise a storm about butter a little turned. I think I see myself—ruminated I—sitting meekly at table, scarce daring to lift up my eyes, utterly fagged out with some quarrel of yesterday, choking down detestably sour muffins that my wife thinks are “delicious”—slipping in dried mouthfuls of burned ham off the side of my fork tines—slipping off my chair sideways at the end, and slipping out with my hat between my knees, to business, and never feeling myself a competent, sound-minded man till the oak door is between me and Peggy! —“Ha, ha—not yet!” said I; and in so earnest a tone that my dog started to his feet—cocked his eye to have a good look into my face—met my smile of triumph with an amiable wag of the tail, and curled up again in the corner. Again, Peggy is rich enough, well enough, mild enough, only she doesn’t care a fig for you. She has married you because father, or grandfather thought the match eligible, and because she didn’t wish to disoblige them. Besides, she didn’t positively hate you, and thought you were a respectable enough young person; she has told you so repeatedly at dinner. She wonders you like to read poetry; she wishes you would buy her a good cookbook; and insists upon you making your will at the birth of the first baby. She thinks Captain So-and-So a splendid-looking fellow, and wishes you would trim up a little, were it only for appearance’s sake. You need not hurry up from the office so early at night: she, bless her dear heart! does not feel lonely. You read to her a love tale; she interrupts the pathetic parts with directions to her seamstress. You read of marriages: she sighs, and asks if Captain So-and-So has left town! She hates to be mewed up in a cottage, or between brick walls; she does _so_ love the Springs! But, again, Peggy loves you; at least she swears it, with her hand on the _Sorrows of Werther_. She has pin-money which she spends for the _Literary World_ and the _Friends in Council_. She is not bad looking, save a bit too much of forehead; nor is she sluttish, unless a _négligé_ till three o’clock, and an ink stain on the forefinger be sluttish; but then she is such a sad blue! You never fancied, when you saw her buried in a three-volumed novel, that it was anything more than a girlish vagary; and when she quoted Latin you thought, innocently, that she had a capital memory for her samplers. [Illustration] But to be bored eternally about Divine Dante and funny Goldoni, is too bad. Your copy of Tasso, a treasure print of 1680, is all bethumbed and dog’s-eared, and spotted with baby gruel. Even your Seneca—an Elzevir—is all sweaty with handling. She adores La Fontaine, reads Balzac with a kind of artist-scowl, and will not let Greek alone. You hint at broken rest and an aching head at breakfast, and she will fling you a scrap of anthology—in lieu of the camphor bottle—or chant the aἰaĩ aἰaĩ, of tragic chorus.