ce nearly choked with gall during the
honeymoon, and had lost all comfort in life before my friends had done
wishing me joy. Yet I chose with caution--a girl bred wholly in the
country, who never knew luxury beyond one silk gown, nor dissipation
above the annual gala of a race ball. Yet she now plays her part in all
the extravagant fopperies of fashion and the town with as ready a grace
as if she never had seen a bush or a grass-plot out of Grosvenor Square!
I am sneered at by all my acquaintance, and paragraphed in the
newspapers. She dissipates my fortune, and contradicts all my humors;
yet the worst of it is, I doubt I love her, or I should never bear all
this. However, I'll never be weak enough to own it. But I meet with
nothing but crosses and vexations--and the fault is entirely hers. I am,
myself, the sweetest-tempered man alive, and hate a teasing temper; and
so I tell her a hundred times a day.--Ay! and what is very
extraordinary, in all our disputes she is always in the wrong. But Lady
Sneerwell, and the set she meets at her house, encourage the
perverseness of her disposition. Then, to complete my vexation, Maria,
my ward, whom I ought to have the power of a father over, is determined
to turn rebel too, and absolutely refuses the man whom I have long
resolved on for her husband--

_Enter_ LADY TEAZLE.

Lady Teazle, Lady Teazle, I'll not bear it!

_Lady Teaz._ Sir Peter, Sir Peter, you may bear it or not, as you
please; but I ought to have my own way in everything, and, what's more,
I will too. What! though I was educated in the country, I know very well
that women of fashion in London are accountable to nobody after they are
married.

_Sir Pet._ Very well, ma'am, very well; so a husband is to have no
influence, no authority?

_Lady Teaz._ Authority! No, to be sure. If you wanted authority over me,
you should have adopted me, and not married me: I am sure you were old
enough.

_Sir Pet._ Old enough!--ay, there it is. Well, well, Lady Teazle, though
my life may be made unhappy by your temper, I'll not be ruined by your
extravagance!

_Lady Teaz._ My extravagance! I'm sure I'm not more extravagant than a
woman of fashion ought to be.

_Sir Pet._ No, no, madam, you shall throw away no more sums on such
unmeaning luxury. Such wastefulness! to spend as much to furnish your
dressing-room with flowers in winter as would suffice to turn the
Pantheon into a greenhouse, and give a _fete champetre_ at Christma