 five hundred pounds of capital.
Mr. Glegg was one of these men, found so impracticable by chancellors of the
exchequer; and knowing this, you will be the better able to understand why he
had not swerved from the conviction that he had made an eligible marriage, in
spite of the too pungent seasoning that nature had given to the eldest Miss
Dodson's virtues. A man with an affectionate disposition, who finds a wife to
concur with his fundamental idea of life, easily comes to persuade himself that
no other woman would have suited him so well, and does a little daily snapping
and quarrelling without any sense of alienation. Mr. Glegg, being of a
reflective turn, and no longer occupied with wool, had much wondering meditation
on the peculiar constitution of the female mind as unfolded to him in his
domestic life; and yet he thought Mrs. Glegg's household ways a model for her
sex: it struck him as a pitiable irregularity in other women if they did not
roll up their table-napkins with the same tightness and emphasis as Mrs. Glegg
did if their pastry had a less leathery consistence, and their damson cheese a
less venerable hardness than hers: nay, even the peculiar combination of grocery
and drug-like odours in Mrs. Glegg's private cupboard impressed him as the only
right thing in the way of cupboard smells. I am not sure that he would not have
longed for the quarrelling again, if it had ceased for an entire week; and it is
certain that an acquiescent mild wife would have left his meditations
comparatively jejune and barren of mystery.
    Mr. Glegg's unmistakeable kind-heartedness was shown in this, that it pained
him more to see his wife at variance with others - even with Dolly, the servant
- than to be in a state of cavil with her himself; and the quarrel between her
and Mr. Tulliver vexed him so much that it quite nullified the pleasure he would
otherwise have had in the state of his early cabbages, as he walked in his
garden before breakfast the next morning. Still he went into breakfast with some
slight hope that, now Mrs. Glegg had »slept upon it,« her anger might be subdued
enough to give way to her usually strong sense of family decorum. She had been
used to boast that there had never been any of those deadly quarrels among the
Dodsons which had disgraced other families; that no Dodson had ever been »cut
off with a shilling,« and no cousin of the Dodsons disowned; as, indeed, why
should they be? for they had no cousins
