Page:A Treatise concerning the Use and Abuse of the Marriage Bed.djvu/298

 that it was what no Body but he would have done: And if he took any thing ill from her, though it was twenty Years after, he would not fail to tell her, she was Ingrate; that she ow'd him a Debt she could never pay; and so run back the whole Story upon her; and how, if he had not been honester than she was, he had never taken her, and then she had been undone.

2. To make the poor Lady compleatly unhappy, he is Jealous of her to the last degree, and treats her very hardly on that Account; and when she expostulates with him upon that Head, and appeals to him for her Conduct ever since Marriage, which has, indeed been blameless, the Brute runs it all back to the first and only false Step of her Life, and, with a flout upon all her Integrity and exactness of Living, tells her, with an old Scots Ballad at the End of it:

It seems, 'tis a proverbial Saying for a Man who has married a Whore, intimating, that as she was a Whore to him, so she would be a Whore to any Body else, or to every Man.

she is all her Life subject to the Reproach; not forty Years Wedlock, and an unblameable Life, will make it up; the Debt is never paid, and yet always a paying; and all this for a shameful yielding her self up a few Days before the Form would have sanctified the Action.

is it sufficient to plead, no not to himself, that he importuned her, or surprized