“I starve you! Why, are not you a great Virginia merchant, and did not I bring you £1500? What would you have? Sure, you can maintain a wife out of that, can’t you?”
“Yes, madam,” says I, “I could maintain a wife, but not a gamester, though you had brought me £1500 a year; no estate is big enough for a box and dice.”
She took fire at that, and flew out in a passion, and after a great many bitter words, told me, in short, that she saw no occasion to alter her conduct; and as for my not maintaining her, when I could not maintain her longer she would find some way or other to maintain herself.
Some time after the first rattle of this kind, she vouchsafed to let me know that she was pleased to be with child. I was at first glad of it, in hopes it would help to abate her madness; but it was all one, and her being with child only added to the rest, for she made such preparations for her lying-in, and the other appendixes of a child’s being born, that, in short, I found she would be downright distracted. And I took the liberty to tell her one day that she would soon bring herself and me to destruction, and entreated her to consider that such figures as those were quite above us, and out of our circle; and, in short, that I neither could nor would allow such expenses; that, at this rate, two or three children would effectually ruin me, and that I desired her to consider what she was doing.
She told me, with an air of disdain, that it was none of her business to consider anything of that matter; that if I could not allow it, she would allow it herself, and I might do my worst.
I begged her to consider things for all that, and not drive me to extremities; that I married her to love and cherish her, and use her as a good wife ought to be used, but not to be ruined and undone by her. In a word, nothing could mollify her, nor any argument persuade her to moderation, but withal she took it so heinously that I should pretend to restrain her, that she told me in so many words she would drop her burthen with me, and then, if I did not like it, she would take care of herself; she would not live with me an hour, for she would not be restrained, not she; and talked a long while at that rate.
I told her, as to her child, which she called her burthen, it should be no burthen to me; as to the rest, she might do as she pleased; it might, however, do me this favour, that I should have no more lyings in at the rate of £136 at a time, as I found she intended it should be now. She told me she could not tell that; if she had no more by me, she hoped she should by somebody else. “Say you so, madam?” said I. “Then they that get them shall keep them.” She did not know that neither, she said, and so turned it off jeering, and, as it were, laughing at me.
This last discourse nettled me, I must confess, and the more because I had a great deal of it and very often, till, in short, we began at length to enter into a friendly treaty about parting.
Nothing could be more criminal than the several discourses we had upon this subject. She demanded a separate maintenance, and, in particular, at the rate of £300 a year, and I demanded security of her that she should not run me in debt. She demanded the keeping of the child, with an allowance of £100 a year for that, and I demanded that I should be secured from being charged for keeping any she might have by somebody else, as she had threatened me.
In the interval, and during these contests, she dropped her burthen (as she called it), and brought me a son, a very fine child.