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I shall not describe my feelings when I found myself in a cage in / Cursitor Street, instead of that fine house in Berkeley Square, which / was to have been mine as the husband of Mrs. Manasseh. What a place! -- in / an odious, dismal street leading from Chancery Lane. A hideous Jew boy / opened the second of three doors and shut it when Mr. Nabb and I (almost / fainting) had entered; then he opened the third door, and then I was / introduced to a filthy place called a coffee-room, which I exchanged for / the solitary comfort of a little dingy back-parlor, where I was left for / a while to brood over my miserable fate. Fancy the change between this / and Berkeley Square! Was I, after all my pains, and cleverness, and / perseverance, cheated at last? Had this Mrs. Manasseh been imposing / upon me, and were the words of the wretch I met at the table-d'hote at / Leamington only meant to mislead me and take me in? I determined to send / for my wife, and know the whole truth. I saw at once that I had been the / victim of an infernal plot, and that the carriage, the house in town, / the West India fortune, were only so many lies which I had blindly / believed. It was true that the debt was but a hundred and fifty pounds; / and I had two thousand at my bankers'. But was the loss of HER 80,000L. / nothing? Was the destruction of my hopes nothing? The accursed addition / to my family of a Jewish wife and three Jewish children, nothing? And / all these I was to support out of my two thousand pounds. I had better / have stopped at home with my mamma and sisters, whom I really did love, / and who produced me eighty pounds a year.
I had a furious interview with Mrs. Stubbs; and when I charged her, the / base wretch! with cheating me, like a brazen serpent as she was, she / flung back the cheat in my teeth, and swore I had swindled her. Why did / I marry her, when she might have had twenty others? She only took me, / she said, because I had twenty thousand pounds. I HAD said I possessed / that sum; but in love, you know, and war all's fair.