“Well, Mr Glegg! it’s a poor return I get for making you the wife I’ve made you all these years. If this is the way I’m to be treated, I’d better ha’ known it before my poor father died, and then, when I’d wanted a home, I should ha’ gone elsewhere, as the choice was offered me.”
Mr Glegg paused from his porridge and looked up, not with any new amazement, but simply with that quiet, habitual wonder with which we regard constant mysteries.
“Why, Mrs G., what have I done now?”
“Done now, Mr Glegg? done now?—I’m sorry for you.”
Not seeing his way to any pertinent answer, Mr Glegg reverted to his porridge.
“There’s husbands in the world,” continued Mrs Glegg, after a pause, “as ’ud have known how to do something different to siding with everybody else against their own wives. Perhaps I’m wrong and you can teach me better. But I’ve allays heard as it’s the husband’s place to stand by the wife, instead o’ rejoicing and triumphing when folks insult her.”
“Now, what call have you to say that?” said Mr Glegg, rather warmly, for though a kind man, he was not as meek as Moses. “When did I rejoice or triumph over you?”
“There’s ways o’ doing things worse than speaking out plain, Mr Glegg. I’d sooner you’d tell me to my face as you make light of me, than try to make out as everybody’s in the right but me, and come to your breakfast in the morning, as I’ve hardly slept an hour this night, and sulk at me as if I was the dirt under your feet.”
“Sulk at you?” said Mr Glegg, in a tone of angry facetiousness. “You’re like a tipsy man as thinks everybody’s had too much but himself.”
“Don’t lower yourself with using coarse language to me, Mr Glegg! It makes you look very small, though you can’t see yourself,” said Mrs Glegg, in a tone of energetic compassion. “A man in your place should set an example, and talk more sensible.”