"I certainly shouldn't have told it in quite that way."
"You had expended on her two hundred and forty-nine pounds nineteen and sixpence ha'penny, besides any amount of fuss, so her ingratitude stung you to the marrow. Still you might have borne with her; you might not even have altered the will which you had made in her favour, and which you kept shaking in her face; only when she took up with another chap she seemed to be coming it a bit too thick. You cried in your anger, 'I'll make you smart for this, my beauty!' So you started to make her smart; but it seems to me that you've done most of the smarting up to now. Was it her cruelty which made you the pretty sight you are?"
"Not altogether."
"Not altogether! You don't mean to say that when you wanted her to be your wife you were anything like what you are now? A nice kind of love yours must have been!"
"I appear to have acquired a really delightful wife."
"If you weren't a dead log it might be that you'd find out how true that was. Any man with a touch of spice in him would give the eyes out of his head for a wife like me, and there have been plenty who were ready to do it."
"As you yourself observed, these things are a question of taste. So you think she was justified in treating me as she did?"
"Justified for not wanting to marry a thing like you! You ought to have been drowned for hinting at it."
"I am myself beginning to think that your point of view may not be wholly incorrect, and that, therefore, it was fortunate that I did not die on the night we were married."
"I don't."