introductory letter from her mother.



CHAPTER XIV



The Marshall family included Marshall and his wife. He was rather a
small man, with blackish hair, small lips, and with a nose just a
little turned up at the tip. As we have been informed, he was a
cabinet-maker. He worked for very good shops, and earned about two
pounds a week. He read books, but he did not know their value, and
often fancied he had made a great discovery on a bookstall of an
author long ago superseded and worthless. He belonged to a
mechanic's institute, and was fond of animal physiology; heard
courses of lectures on it at the institute, and had studied two or
three elementary handbooks. He found in a second-hand dealer's shop
a model, which could be taken to pieces, of the inside of the human
body. He had also bought a diagram of a man, showing the
circulation, and this he had hung in his bedroom, his mother-in-law
objecting most strongly on the ground that its effect on his wife was
injurious. He had a notion that the world might be regenerated if
men and women were properly instructed in physiological science, and
if before marriage they would study their own physical peculiarities,
and those of their intended partners. The crossing of peculiarities
nevertheless presented difficulties. A man with long legs surely
ought to choose a woman with short legs, but if a man who was
mathematical married a woman who was mathematical, the result might
be a mathematical prodigy. On the other hand the parents of the