"Ha-ha! not yet!" said I, and in so earnest a tone that my dog started to his feet, cocked his eye to have a good look into my face, met my smile of triumph with an amiable wag of the tail, and curled up again in the corner.
Again, Peggy is rich enough, well enough, mild enough, only she doesn't care a fig for you. She has married you because father or grandfather thought the match eligible, and because she didn't wish to disoblige them. Besides, she didn't positively hate you, and thought you were a respectable enough young person; she has told you so repeatedly at dinner. She wonders you like to read poetry; she wishes you would buy her a good cook-book; and insists upon your making your will at the birth of the first baby.
She thinks Captain So-and-So a splendid-looking fellow, and wishes you would trim up a little, were it only for appearance' sake.
You need not hurry up from the office so early at night, she, bless her dear heart! does not feel lonely. You read to her a love tale: she interrupts the pathetic parts with directions to her seamstress. You read of marriages: she sighs, and asks if Captain So-and-So has left town. She hates to be mewed up in a cottage, or between brick walls; she does so love the Springs!
But, again, Peggy loves you—at least she swears it, with her hand on "The Sorrows of Werter." She has pin-money which she spends for the "Literary World" and the "Friends in Council." She is not bad-looking, save a bit too much of forehead; nor is she sluttish, unless a negligé till three o'clock, and an ink-stain on the forefinger be sluttish; but then she is such a sad blue!
You never fancied, when you saw her buried in a three-volume novel, that it was anything more than a girlish vagary; and when she quoted Latin, you thought innocently that she had a capital memory for her samplers.
But to be bored eternally about divine Dante and funny Goldoni is too bad. Your copy of Tasso, a treasure print of 1680, is all bethumbed and dog's-eared, and spotted with baby gruel. Even your Seneca—an Elzevir—is all sweaty with handling. She adores La Fontaine, reads Balzac with a kind of artist scowl, and will not let Greek alone.
You hint at broken rest and an aching head at breakfast, and she will fling you a scrap of Anthology—in lien of the camphor-bottle—or chant the [Greek] alai alai of tragic chorus.
The nurse is getting dinner; you are holding the baby; Peggy is reading Bruyère.
The fire smoked thick as pitch, and puffed out little clouds over the chimney-piece. I gave the fore-stick a kick; at the thought of Peggy, baby, and Bruyère.