“‘Mr. Jericho, when can you let me have some money?’”
The lady’s confidence in her husband’s wealth ought to have been shaken by what followed her application. Mr. Jericho turned a deaf ear to the appeal, which was repeated in every variety of tone and accent.
At length, “waving her right hand before her husband’s face with a significant and snaky motion,” she reiterated her demand with a terrible calmness:
“‘When can I have some money?’
“‘Woman!’ cried Jericho vehemently, as though at once and for ever he emptied his heart of the sex; and, rushing from the room, he felt himself in the flattering vivacity of the moment a single man. ‘I’m sure, after all, I do my best to love the woman,’ thought Jericho, ‘and yet she will ask me for money.’”
Disgusted with these unreasonable demands for money, Mr. Jericho determines to revenge himself by taking a day’s pleasure with three special friends, to be ended by “a quiet banquet at which the human heart would expand in good fellowship, and where the wine was above doubt.”
The dinner was a great success. It was very late—or rather somewhat early, as the sparrows were twittering from the eaves—when Mr. Jericho sought the marital couch, in which, too, his “wife Sabilla” was evidently “in a sound, deep, sweet sleep.”
“Untucking the bed-clothes, and making himself the thinnest slice of a man, Jericho slides between the sheets; and there he lies feloniously still, and he thinks to himself—Being asleep, she cannot tell how late I came to bed. At all events, it is open to dispute, and that is something.
“‘Mr. Jericho, when can you let me have some money?’
“With open eyes, and clearly ringing every word upon the morning air, did Mrs. Jericho repeat this primal question.