tercourse. But if the husband be a man with whom
you have lived on a friendly footing before marriage,--if you did not
come in on the wife's side,--if you did not sneak into the house in
her train, but were an old friend in fast habits of intimacy before
their courtship was so much as thought on,--look about you--your
tenure is precarious--before a twelve-month shall roll over your head,
you shall find your old friend gradually grow cool and altered towards
you, and at last seek opportunities of breaking with you. I have
scarce a married friend of my acquaintance, upon whose firm faith I
can rely, whose friendship did not commence _after the period of his
marriage_. With some limitations they can endure that: but that the
good man should have dared to enter into a solemn league of friendship
in which they were not consulted, though it happened before they
knew him,--before they that are now man and wife ever met,--this
is intolerable to them. Every long friendship, every old authentic
intimacy, must be brought into their office to be new stamped with
their currency, as a sovereign Prince calls in the good old money that
was coined in some reign before he was born or thought of, to be new
marked and minted with the stamp of his authority, before he will
let it pass current in the world. You may guess what luck generally
befalls such a rusty piece of metal as I am in these _new mintings_.

Innumerable are the ways which they take to insult and worm you out
of their husband's confidence. Laughing at all you say with a kind of
wonder, as if you were a queer kind of fellow that said good things,
_but an oddity_, is one of the ways;--they have a particular kind of
stare for the purpose;--till at last the husband, who used to defer to
your judgment, and would pass over some excrescences of understanding
and manner for the sake of a general vein of observation (not quite
vulgar) which he perceived in you, begins to suspect whether you are
not altogether a humorist,--a fellow well enough to have consorted
with in his bachelor days, but not quite so proper to be introduced
to ladies. This may be called the staring way; and is that which has
oftenest been put in practice against me.

Then there is the exaggerating way, or the way of irony: that is,
where they find you an object of especial regard with their husband,
who is not so easily to be shaken from the lasting attachment founded
on esteem which he has conceived towards you;