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 it is,’ she said one day, ‘the sort of husband as does for the country doesn’t do for London.’ At Great Oakhurst, where the doors were always open into the yard and the garden, where every house was merely a covered bit of the open space, where people were always in and out, and women never sat down, except to their meals, or to do a little stitching or sewing, it was really not necessary, as Mrs Caffyn observed, that husband and wife should ‘hit it so fine.’ Mrs Marshall hated all the conveniences of London. She abominated particularly the taps, and longed to be obliged in all weathers to go out to the well and wind up the bucket. She abominated also the dust-bin, for it was a pleasure to be compelled—so at least she thought it now—to walk down to the muck-heap and throw on it what the pig could not eat. Nay, she even missed that corner of the garden against the elder-tree, where the pig-stye was, for ‘you could smell the elder-flowers there in the spring-time, and the pig-stye wasn’t as bad as the stuffy back room in Great Ormond Street when three or four men were in it.’ She did all she could to spend her energy on her cooking and cleaning, but ‘there was no satisfaction in it,’ and she became much depressed, especially after the child died. This was the main reason why Mrs Caffyn determined to live with her. Marshall was glad she resolved to come. His wife had her full share of the common sense he desired, but the experiment had not altogether succeeded. He knew she was lonely, and he was sorry for her, although he did not see how he could mend matters. He reflected carefully, nothing had happened which was a surprise to him, the relationship was what he had supposed it would be, excepting that the child did not live and its mother was a little miserable. There was nothing he would not do for her, but he really had nothing more to offer her.