vociferous talk about "freedom of speech," and on Mrs. Marshall's a
quiet estimate that, with her early training on a Vermont farm, and
with the high state of cultivation under which she had brought their
five acres, they could successfully go into the truck-farming
business like their neighbors. Besides this, they had the resource,
extraordinary among University families, of an account in the
savings-bank on which to fall back. They had always been able to pay
their debts and have a small surplus by the expedient of refusing to
acknowledge a tenth part of the social obligations under which
the rest of the faculty groaned and sweated with martyr's pride.
Perfidiously refusing to do their share in the heart-breaking struggle
to "keep up the dignity" of the academic profession, they were not
overwhelmed by the super-human difficulties of that undertaking.

So it happened that the Marshall children heard no forebodings about
the future, but only heated statements of what seemed to their father
the right of a teacher to say what he believed. Professor Marshall had
gone of his own initiative to face the legislative committee which was
"investigating" him, had quite lost his temper (never very securely
held in leash), had told them his highly spiced opinion of their
strictures on his teaching and of the worth of any teacher they could
find who would submit to them. Then he had gone home and put on
his overalls. This last was rather a rhetorical flourish; for his
cosmopolitan, urban youth had left him ineradicably ignorant of the
processes of agriculture. But like all Professor Marshall's flourishes
it was a perfectly sincere one. He was quite cheerfully prepared to
submit himself to his wife's instruction in the new way of life.

All these picturesque facts, as was inevitable in America, had
instantly reached the newspapers, which, lacking more exciting news