“Indeed, my dear, I take it rather unkindly of you that you pay so little attention to my feelings—”
“I see I am of no consequence to you now; I find every body’s society is preferred to mine: it was not always so.—Well! it is what I might have expected—”
“Heigho!—Heigho!—”
Griselda’s sighs were still persuasive, and her husband, notwithstanding that he felt the restraints which daily multiplied upon his time and upon his personal liberty becoming irksome, had not the barbarity to give pain to the woman by whom he was so tenderly beloved. He did not consider that in this case, as well as in many others, apparent mercy is real cruelty. The more this monopolizing humour of his wife’s was indulged, the more insatiable it became. Every person, every thing but herself, was to be excluded from his heart; and when this sole patent for pleasure was granted to her, she became rather careless in its exercise, as those are apt to be who fear no competitors. In proportion as her endeavours to please abated, her expectations of being adored increased: the slightest word of blame, the most remote hint that any thing in her conduct, manners, or even dress, could be altered for the better, was the signal for battle or for tears.
One night she wept for an hour, and debated for two, about an alteration in her head-dress, which her husband unluckily happened to say made it more becoming. More becoming! implied that it was before unbecoming. She recollected the time when every thing she wore was becoming in his eyes—but that time, alas! was completely past; and she only wished that she could forget that it had ever been.
“To have been happy is additional misery.”
This misery may appear comic to some people, but it certainly was not so to our heroine’s unfortunate husband. It was in vain that, in mitigation of his offence, he pleaded total want of knowledge in the arcana of the toilette, absolute inferiority of taste, and a willing submission to the decrees of fashion.
This submission was called indifference—this calmness construed into contempt. He stood convicted of having said that the lady’s dress was unbecoming—she was certain that he thought more than he said, and that every thing about her was grown disagreeable to him.
It was in vain he represented that his affection had not been created, and could not be annihilated, by such trifles; that it rested on the solid basis of esteem.
“Esteem!” cried his wife—“that is the unkindest stroke of all! When a man begins to talk of esteem, there is an end of love.”