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!"
"You forget," replied I, "that, knowing our passion for the country, and that we had abjured the world, he did not like to ask us, because he knew he should be refused."
"I am not so sure he would have been refused, Helen; or, as to having abjured the world—No, no; we are not such fools as to do that—are we, my dearest girl?"