prodigy might each have corresponding qualities, which, mixed with
the mathematical tendency, would completely nullify it. The path of
duty therefore was by no means plain. However, Marshall was sure
that great cities dwarfed their inhabitants, and as he himself was
not so tall as his father, and, moreover, suffered from bad
digestion, and had a tendency to 'run to head,' he determined to
select as his wife a 'daughter of the soil,' to use his own phrase,
above the average height, with a vigorous constitution and plenty of
common sense. She need not be bookish, 'he could supply all that
himself.' Accordingly, he married Sarah Caffyn. His mother and Mrs
Caffyn had been early friends. He was not mistaken in Sarah. She
was certainly robust; she was a shrewd housekeeper, and she never
read anything, except now and then a paragraph or two in the weekly
newspaper, notwithstanding (for there were no children), time hung
rather heavily on her hands. One child had been born, but to
Marshall's surprise and disappointment it was a poor, rickety thing,
and died before it was a twelvemonth old.

Mrs Marshall was not a very happy woman. Marshall was a great
politician and spent many of his evenings away from home at political
meetings. He never informed her what he had been doing, and if he
had told her, she would neither have understood nor cared anything
about it. At Great Oakhurst she heard everything and took an
interest in it, and she often wished with all her heart that the
subject which occupied Marshall's thoughts was not Chartism but the
draining of that heavy, rush-grown bit of rough pasture that lay at
the bottom of the village. He was very good and kind to her, and she
never imagined, before marriage, that he ought to be more. She was
sure that at Great Oakhurst she would have been quite comfortable
with him but somehow, in London, it was different. 'I don't know how