With prosperity Franklin began to think of matrimony. A family of Godfreys lived in the same house with him, and now Mrs. Godfrey undertook to make a match between him and the daughter of a relative of hers. Franklin's account of this affair for its coolness and placidity may almost be compared with Gibbon's "I sighed as a lover, I obeyed as a son." On learning that the girl's parents could not or would not give with her enough money to pay off his debts, the gallant suitor at once and irrevocably withdrew. He then looked about him for another match, but found to his chagrin that an adventurous printer could not command an agreeable wife and a dowry at the same time. Being determined to marry, that he might bring order into his life, he at last turned to Miss Read, with whom he had maintained a friendly correspondence, and notwithstanding the difficulties in the way married her on the 1st of September, 1730. If he rejected Miss Godfrey because she brought no dowry with her, he praised his wife chiefly because she aided him in his economies. "He that would thrive must ask his wife," he quotes, and congratulates himself that he has a wife as much disposed to frugality as himself. She helped in the business; they kept no idle servants; their table was plain and simple, their furniture of the cheapest. His breakfast for a long time was bread and milk, and he ate it out of a twopenny earthen porringer with a pewter spoon. "But mark," he adds, "how luxuries will enter families and make a progress despite of principles: being called one morning to breakfast, I found it in a china bowl, with a spoon of silver! They had been bought for me without my knowledge by my wife, and had cost her the enormous sum of twenty-three shillings, for which she had no other excuse or apology to make but that she thought _her_ husband deserved a silver spoon and china bowl as well as any of his neighbors. This was the first appearance of plate and china in our house, which afterward, in a course of years as our wealth increased, augmented gradually to several hundred pounds in value." Mrs. Franklin's temper was not of the serenest, and her manners perhaps were not such as would have honored him had she followed him into the great world; but she made him a good wife,--and we need not repeat the tattle which we are told is still current among some of the high families of Philadelphia. They had two children,--a son, the idol of his father's heart, who died as a child; and a daughter, who married Richard Bache, and is the ancestress of a large family.