- end_line
- 2609
- extracted_at
- 2026-01-30T07:57:45.581Z
- extracted_by
- structure-extraction-lambda
- start_line
- 2567
- text
- projector. The maxim, "Whatever is, is right," is not hers. Her maxim
is, Whatever is, is wrong; and what is more, must be altered; and what
is still more, must be altered right away. Dreadful maxim for the wife
of a dozy old dreamer like me, who dote on seventh days as days of
rest, and out of a sabbatical horror of industry, will, on a week day,
go out of my road a quarter of a mile, to avoid the sight of a man at
work.
That matches are made in heaven, may be, but my wife would have been
just the wife for Peter the Great, or Peter the Piper. How she would
have set in order that huge littered empire of the one, and with
indefatigable painstaking picked the peck of pickled peppers for the
other.
But the most wonderful thing is, my wife never thinks of her end. Her
youthful incredulity, as to the plain theory, and still plainer fact of
death, hardly seems Christian. Advanced in years, as she knows she must
be, my wife seems to think that she is to teem on, and be inexhaustible
forever. She doesn't believe in old age. At that strange promise in
the plain of Mamre, my old wife, unlike old Abraham's, would not have
jeeringly laughed within herself.
Judge how to me, who, sitting in the comfortable shadow of my chimney,
smoking my comfortable pipe, with ashes not unwelcome at my feet,
and ashes not unwelcome all but in my mouth; and who am thus in a
comfortable sort of not unwelcome, though, indeed, ashy enough way,
reminded of the ultimate exhaustion even of the most fiery life; judge
how to me this unwarrantable vitality in my wife must come, sometimes,
it is true, with a moral and a calm, but oftener with a breeze and a
ruffle.
If the doctrine be true, that in wedlock contraries attract, by how
cogent a fatality must I have been drawn to my wife! While spicily
impatient of present and past, like a glass of ginger-beer she
overflows with her schemes; and, with like energy as she puts down
her foot, puts down her preserves and her pickles, and lives with
them in a continual future; or ever full of expectations both from
time and space, is ever restless for newspapers, and ravenous for
letters. Content with the years that are gone, taking no thought for
the morrow, and looking for no new thing from any person or quarter
whatever, I have not a single scheme or expectation on earth, save in
unequal resistance of the undue encroachment of hers.
- title
- Chunk 5