But if not rich, then poor. Bah! the thought made me stir the coals; but there was still no blaze. The paltry earnings you are able to wring out of clients by the sweat of your brow will now be all our income; you will be pestered for pin-money, and pestered with your poor wife's relations. Ten to one, she will stickle about taste—"Sir Visto's"—and want to make this so pretty, and that so charming, if she only had the means; and is sure Paul (a kiss) can't deny his little Peggy such a trifling sum, and all for the common benefit.
Then she, for one, means that her children sha'n't go a-begging for clothes—and another pull at the purse. Trust a poor mother to dress her children in finery!
Perhaps she is ugly—not noticeable at first, but growing on her, and (what is worse) growing faster on you. You wonder why you didn't see that vulgar nose long ago; and that lip—it is very strange, you think, that you ever thought it pretty. And then, to come to breakfast with her hair looking as it does, and you not so much as daring to say, "Peggy, do brush your hair!" Her foot, too—not very bad when decently chausse; but now since she's married she does wear such infernal slippers! And yet for all this, to be prigging up for an hour, when any of my old chums come to dine with me!
"Bless your kind hearts, my dear fellows," said I, thrusting the tongs into the coals and speaking out loud, as if my voice could reach from Virginia to Paris, "not married yet!"
Perhaps Peggy is pretty enough, only shrewish.
No matter for cold coffee; you should have been up before.
What sad, thin, poorly cooked chops, to eat with your rolls!
She thinks they are very good, and wonders how you can set such an example to your children.
The butter is nauseating.
She has no other, and hopes you'll not raise a storm about butter a little turned. I think I see myself, ruminated I, sitting meekly at table, scarce daring to lift up my eyes, utterly fagged out with some quarrel of yesterday, choking down detestably sour muffins, that my wife thinks are "delicious"—slipping in dried mouthfuls of burnt ham off the side of my forktines—slipping off my chair sideways at the end, and slipping out with my hat between my knees, to business, and never feeling myself a competent, sound-minded man till the oak door is between me and Peggy.