Chapter: Mr. and Mrs. Glegg at Home


In order to see Mr. and Mrs. Glegg at home, we must enter the town of
St. Ogg's,--that venerable town with the red fluted roofs and the
broad warehouse gables, where the black ships unlade themselves of
their burthens from the far north, and carry away, in exchange, the
precious inland products, the well-crushed cheese and the soft fleeces
which my refined readers have doubtless become acquainted with through
the medium of the best classic pastorals.

It is one of those old, old towns which impress one as a continuation
and outgrowth of nature, as much as the nests of the bower-birds or
the winding galleries of the white ants; a town which carries the
traces of its long growth and history like a millennial tree, and has
sprung up and developed in the same spot between the river and the low
hill from the time when the Roman legions turned their backs on it
from the camp on the hillside, and the long-haired sea-kings came up
the river and looked with fierce, eager eyes at the fatness of the
land. It is a town "familiar with forgotten years." The shadow of the
Saxon hero-king still walks there fitfully, reviewing the scenes of
his youth and love-time, and is met by the gloomier shadow of the
dreadful heathen Dane, who was stabbed in the midst of his warriors by
the sword of an invisible avenger, and who rises on autumn evenings
like a white mist from his tumulus on the hill, and hovers in the
court of the old hall by the river-side, the spot where he was thus
miraculously slain in the days before the old hall was built. It was
the Normans who began to build that fine old hall, which is, like the
town, telling of the thoughts and hands of widely sundered
generations; but it is all so old that we look with loving pardon at
its inconsistencies, and are well content that they who built the
stone oriel, and they who built the Gothic facade and towers of finest
small brickwork with the trefoil ornament, and the windows and
battlements defined with stone, did not sacreligiously pull down the
ancient half-timbered body with its oak-roofed banqueting-hall.

But older even than this old hall is perhaps the bit of wall now built
into the belfry of the parish church, and said to be a remnant of the
original chapel dedicated to St. Ogg, the patron saint of this ancient
town, of whose history I possess several manuscript versions. I
incline to the briefest, since, if it should not be wholly true, it is
at least likely to contain the least falsehood. "Ogg the son of
Beorl," says my private hagiographer, "was a boatman who gained a
scanty living by ferrying passengers across the river Floss. And it
came to pass, one evening when the winds were high, that there sat
moaning by the brink of the river a woman with a child in her arms;
and she was clad in rags, and had a worn and withered look, and she
craved to be rowed across the river. And the men thereabout questioned
her, and said, 'Wherefore dost thou desire to cross the river? Tarry
till the morning, and take shelter here for the night; so shalt thou
be wise and not foolish.' Still she went on to mourn and crave. But
Ogg the son of Beorl came up and said, 'I will ferry thee across; it
is enough that thy heart needs it.' And he ferried her across. And it
came to pass, when she stepped ashore, that her rags were turned into
robes of flowing white, and her face became bright with exceeding
beauty, and there was a glory around it, so that she shed a light on
the water like the moon in its brightness. And she said, 'Ogg, the son
of Beorl, thou art blessed in that thou didst not question and wrangle
with the heart's need, but wast smitten with pity, and didst
straightway relieve the same. And from henceforth whoso steps into thy
boat shall be in no peril from the storm; and whenever it puts forth
to the rescue, it shall save the lives both of men and beasts.' And
when the floods came, many were saved by reason of that blessing on
the boat. But when Ogg the son of Beorl died, behold, in the parting
of his soul, the boat loosed itself from its moorings, and was floated
with the ebbing tide in great swiftness to the ocean, and was seen no
more. Yet it was witnessed in the floods of aftertime, that at the
coming on of eventide, Ogg the son of Beorl was always seen with his
boat upon the wide-spreading waters, and the Blessed Virgin sat in the
prow, shedding a light around as of the moon in its brightness, so
that the rowers in the gathering darkness took heart and pulled anew."

This legend, one sees, reflects from a far-off time the visitation of
the floods, which, even when they left human life untouched, were
widely fatal to the helpless cattle, and swept as sudden death over
all smaller living things. But the town knew worse troubles even than
the floods,--troubles of the civil wars, when it was a continual
fighting-place, where first Puritans thanked God for the blood of the
Loyalists, and then Loyalists thanked God for the blood of the
Puritans. Many honest citizens lost all their possessions for
conscience' sake in those times, and went forth beggared from their
native town. Doubtless there are many houses standing now on which
those honest citizens turned their backs in sorrow,--quaint-gabled
houses looking on the river, jammed between newer warehouses, and
penetrated by surprising passages, which turn and turn at sharp angles
till they lead you out on a muddy strand overflowed continually by the
rushing tide. Everywhere the brick houses have a mellow look, and in
Mrs. Glegg's day there was no incongruous new-fashioned smartness, no
plate-glass in shop-windows, no fresh stucco-facing or other
fallacious attempt to make fine old red St. Ogg's wear the air of a
town that sprang up yesterday. The shop-windows were small and
unpretending; for the farmers' wives and daughters who came to do
their shopping on market-days were not to be withdrawn from their
regular well-known shops; and the tradesmen had no wares intended for
customers who would go on their way and be seen no more. Ah! even Mrs.
Glegg's day seems far back in the past now, separated from us by
changes that widen the years. War and the rumor of war had then died
out from the minds of men, and if they were ever thought of by the
farmers in drab greatcoats, who shook the grain out of their
sample-bags and buzzed over it in the full market-place, it was as a
state of things that belonged to a past golden age when prices were
high. Surely the time was gone forever when the broad river could
bring up unwelcome ships; Russia was only the place where the linseed
came from,--the more the better,--making grist for the great vertical
millstones with their scythe-like arms, roaring and grinding and
carefully sweeping as if an informing soul were in them. The
Catholics, bad harvests, and the mysterious fluctuations of trade were
the three evils mankind had to fear; even the floods had not been
great of late years. The mind of St. Ogg's did not look extensively
before or after. It inherited a long past without thinking of it, and
had no eyes for the spirits that walk the streets. Since the centuries
when St. Ogg with his boat and the Virgin Mother at the prow had been
seen on the wide water, so many memories had been left behind, and had
gradually vanished like the receding hilltops! And the present time
was like the level plain where men lose their belief in volcanoes and
earthquakes, thinking to-morrow will be as yesterday, and the giant
forces that used to shake the earth are forever laid to sleep. The
days were gone when people could be greatly wrought upon by their
faith, still less change it; the Catholics were formidable because
they would lay hold of government and property, and burn men alive;
not because any sane and honest parishioner of St. Ogg's could be
brought to believe in the Pope. One aged person remembered how a rude
multitude had been swayed when John Wesley preached in the
cattle-market; but for a long while it had not been expected of
preachers that they should shake the souls of men. An occasional burst
of fervor in Dissenting pulpits on the subject of infant baptism was
the only symptom of a zeal unsuited to sober times when men had done
with change. Protestantism sat at ease, unmindful of schisms, careless
of proselytism: Dissent was an inheritance along with a superior pew
and a business connection; and Churchmanship only wondered
contemptuously at Dissent as a foolish habit that clung greatly to
families in the grocery and chandlering lines, though not incompatible
with prosperous wholesale dealing. But with the Catholic Question had
come a slight wind of controversy to break the calm: the elderly
rector had become occasionally historical and argumentative; and Mr.
Spray, the Independent minister, had begun to preach political
sermons, in which he distinguished with much subtlety between his
fervent belief in the right of the Catholics to the franchise and his
fervent belief in their eternal perdition. Most of Mr. Spray's
hearers, however, were incapable of following his subtleties, and many
old-fashioned Dissenters were much pained by his "siding with the
Catholics"; while others thought he had better let politics alone.
Public spirit was not held in high esteem at St. Ogg's, and men who
busied themselves with political questions were regarded with some
suspicion, as dangerous characters; they were usually persons who had
little or no business of their own to manage, or, if they had, were
likely enough to become insolvent.

This was the general aspect of things at St. Ogg's in Mrs. Glegg's
day, and at that particular period in her family history when she had
had her quarrel with Mr. Tulliver. It was a time when ignorance was
much more comfortable than at present, and was received with all the
honors in very good society, without being obliged to dress itself in
an elaborate costume of knowledge; a time when cheap periodicals were
not, and when country surgeons never thought of asking their female
patients if they were fond of reading, but simply took it for granted
that they preferred gossip; a time when ladies in rich silk gowns wore
large pockets, in which they carried a mutton-bone to secure them
against cramp. Mrs. Glegg carried such a bone, which she had inherited
from her grandmother with a brocaded gown that would stand up empty,
like a suit of armor, and a silver-headed walking-stick; for the
Dodson family had been respectable for many generations.

Mrs. Glegg had both a front and a back parlor in her excellent house
at St. Ogg's, so that she had two points of view from which she could
observe the weakness of her fellow-beings, and reinforce her
thankfulness for her own exceptional strength of mind. From her front
window she could look down the Tofton Road, leading out of St. Ogg's,
and note the growing tendency to "gadding about" in the wives of men
not retired from business, together with a practice of wearing woven
cotton stockings, which opened a dreary prospect for the coming
generation; and from her back windows she could look down the pleasant
garden and orchard which stretched to the river, and observe the folly
of Mr. Glegg in spending his time among "them flowers and vegetables."
For Mr. Glegg, having retired from active business as a wool-stapler
for the purpose of enjoying himself through the rest of his life, had
found this last occupation so much more severe than his business, that
he had been driven into amateur hard labor as a dissipation, and
habitually relaxed by doing the work of two ordinary gardeners. The
economizing of a gardener's wages might perhaps have induced Mrs.
Glegg to wink at this folly, if it were possible for a healthy female
mind even to simulate respect for a husband's hobby. But it is well
known that this conjugal complacency belongs only to the weaker
portion of the sex, who are scarcely alive to the responsibilities of
a wife as a constituted check on her husband's pleasures, which are
hardly ever of a rational or commendable kind.

Mr. Glegg on his side, too, had a double source of mental occupation,
which gave every promise of being inexhaustible. On the one hand, he
surprised himself by his discoveries in natural history, finding that
his piece of garden-ground contained wonderful caterpillars, slugs,
and insects, which, so far as he had heard, had never before attracted
human observation; and he noticed remarkable coincidences between
these zoological phenomena and the great events of that time,--as, for
example, that before the burning of York Minster there had been
mysterious serpentine marks on the leaves of the rose-trees, together
with an unusual prevalence of slugs, which he had been puzzled to know
the meaning of, until it flashed upon him with this melancholy
conflagration. (Mr. Glegg had an unusual amount of mental activity,
which, when disengaged from the wool business, naturally made itself a
pathway in other directions.) And his second subject of meditation was
the "contrairiness" of the female mind, as typically exhibited in Mrs.
Glegg. That a creature made--in a genealogical sense--out of a man's
rib, and in this particular case maintained in the highest
respectability without any trouble of her own, should be normally in a
state of contradiction to the blandest propositions and even to the
most accommodating concessions, was a mystery in the scheme of things
to which he had often in vain sought a clew in the early chapters of
Genesis. Mr. Glegg had chosen the eldest Miss Dodson as a handsome
embodiment of female prudence and thrift, and being himself of a
money-getting, money-keeping turn, had calculated on much conjugal
harmony. But in that curious compound, the feminine character, it may
easily happen that the flavor is unpleasant in spite of excellent
ingredients; and a fine systematic stinginess may be accompanied with
a seasoning that quite spoils its relish. Now, good Mr. Glegg himself
was stingy in the most amiable manner; his neighbors called him
"near," which always means that the person in question is a lovable
skinflint. If you expressed a preference for cheese-parings, Mr. Glegg
would remember to save them for you, with a good-natured delight in
gratifying your palate, and he was given to pet all animals which
required no appreciable keep. There was no humbug or hypocrisy about
Mr. Glegg; his eyes would have watered with true feeling over the sale
of a widow's furniture, which a five-pound note from his side pocket
would have prevented; but a donation of five pounds to a person "in a
small way of life" would have seemed to him a mad kind of lavishness
rather than "charity," which had always presented itself to him as a
contribution of small aids, not a neutralizing of misfortune. And Mr.
Glegg was just as fond of saving other people's money as his own; he
would have ridden as far round to avoid a turnpike when his expenses
were to be paid for him, as when they were to come out of his own
pocket, and was quite zealous in trying to induce indifferent
acquaintances to adopt a cheap substitute for blacking. This
inalienable habit of saving, as an end in itself, belonged to the
industrious men of business of a former generation, who made their
fortunes slowly, almost as the tracking of the fox belongs to the
harrier,--it constituted them a "race," which is nearly lost in these
days of rapid money-getting, when lavishness comes close on the back
of want. In old-fashioned times an "independence" was hardly ever made
without a little miserliness as a condition, and you would have found
that quality in every provincial district, combined with characters as
various as the fruits from which we can extract acid. The true
Harpagons were always marked and exceptional characters; not so the
worthy tax-payers, who, having once pinched from real necessity,
retained even in the midst of their comfortable retirement, with their
wallfruit and wine-bins, the habit of regarding life as an ingenious
process of nibbling out one's livelihood without leaving any
perceptible deficit, and who would have been as immediately prompted
to give up a newly taxed luxury when they had had their clear five
hundred a year, as when they had only 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 druglike odors 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 unmistakable 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 in to 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 who had not money out at use, or some houses of their own, at
the very least.

There was one evening-cloud which had always disappeared from Mrs.
Glegg's brow when she sat at the breakfast-table. It was her fuzzy
front of curls; for as she occupied herself in household matters in
the morning it would have been a mere extravagance to put on anything
so superfluous to the making of leathery pastry as a fuzzy curled
front. By half-past ten decorum demanded the front; until then Mrs.
Glegg could economize it, and society would never be any the wiser.
But the absence of that cloud only left it more apparent that the
cloud of severity remained; and Mr. Glegg, perceiving this, as he sat
down to his milkporridge, which it was his old frugal habit to stem
his morning hunger with, prudently resolved to leave the first remark
to Mrs. Glegg, lest, to so delicate an article as a lady's temper, the
slightest touch should do mischief. People who seem to enjoy their ill
temper have a way of keeping it in fine condition by inflicting
privations on themselves. That was Mrs. Glegg's way. She made her tea
weaker than usual this morning, and declined butter. It was a hard
case that a vigorous mood for quarrelling, so highly capable of using
an opportunity, should not meet with a single remark from Mr. Glegg on
which to exercise itself. But by and by it appeared that his silence
would answer the purpose, for he heard himself apostrophized at last
in that tone peculiar to the wife of one's bosom.

"Well, Mr. Glegg! it's a poor return I get for making you the wife
I've made you all these years. If this is the way I'm to be treated,
I'd better ha' known it before my poor father died, and then, when I'd
wanted a home, I should ha' gone elsewhere, as the choice was offered
me."

Mr. Glegg paused from his porridge and looked up, not with any new
amazement, but simply with that quiet, habitual wonder with which we
regard constant mysteries.

"Why, Mrs. G., what have I done now?"

"Done now, Mr. Glegg? _done now?_--I'm sorry for you."

Not seeing his way to any pertinent answer, Mr. Glegg reverted to his
porridge.

"There's husbands in the world," continued Mrs. Glegg, after a pause,
"as 'ud have known how to do something different to siding with
everybody else against their own wives. Perhaps I'm wrong and you can
teach me better. But I've allays heard as it's the husband's place to
stand by the wife, instead o' rejoicing and triumphing when folks
insult her."

"Now, what call have you to say that?" said Mr. Glegg, rather warmly,
for though a kind man, he was not as meek as Moses. "When did I
rejoice or triumph over you?"

"There's ways o' doing things worse than speaking out plain, Mr.
Glegg. I'd sooner you'd tell me to my face as you make light of me,
than try to make out as everybody's in the right but me, and come to
your breakfast in the morning, as I've hardly slept an hour this
night, and sulk at me as if I was the dirt under your feet."

"Sulk at you?" said Mr. Glegg, in a tone of angry facetiousness.
"You're like a tipsy man as thinks everybody's had too much but
himself."

"Don't lower yourself with using coarse language to _me_, Mr. Glegg!
It makes you look very small, though you can't see yourself," said
Mrs. Glegg, in a tone of energetic compassion. "A man in your place
should set an example, and talk more sensible."

"Yes; but will you listen to sense?" retorted Mr. Glegg, sharply. "The
best sense I can talk to you is what I said last night,--as you're i'
the wrong to think o' calling in your money, when it's safe enough if
you'd let it alone, all because of a bit of a tiff, and I was in hopes
you'd ha' altered your mind this morning. But if you'd like to call it
in, don't do it in a hurry now, and breed more enmity in the family,
but wait till there's a pretty mortgage to be had without any trouble.
You'd have to set the lawyer to work now to find an investment, and
make no end o' expense."

Mrs. Glegg felt there was really something in this, but she tossed her
head and emitted a guttural interjection to indicate that her silence
was only an armistice, not a peace. And, in fact hostilities soon
broke out again.

"I'll thank you for my cup o' tea, now, Mrs. G.," said Mr. Glegg,
seeing that she did not proceed to give it him as usual, when he had
finished his porridge. She lifted the teapot with a slight toss of the
head, and said,--

"I'm glad to hear you'll _thank_ me, Mr. Glegg. It's little thanks _I_
get for what I do for folks i' this world. Though there's never a
woman o' _your_ side o' the family, Mr. Glegg, as is fit to stand up
with me, and I'd say it if I was on my dying bed. Not but what I've
allays conducted myself civil to your kin, and there isn't one of 'em
can say the contrary, though my equils they aren't, and nobody shall
make me say it."

"You'd better leave finding fault wi' my kin till you've left off
quarrelling with you own, Mrs. G.," said Mr. Glegg, with angry
sarcasm. "I'll trouble you for the milk-jug."

"That's as false a word as ever you spoke, Mr. Glegg," said the lady,
pouring out the milk with unusual profuseness, as much as to say, if
he wanted milk he should have it with a vengeance. "And you know it's
false. I'm not the woman to quarrel with my own kin; _you_ may, for
I've known you to do it."

"Why, what did you call it yesterday, then, leaving your sister's
house in a tantrum?"

"I'd no quarrel wi' my sister, Mr. Glegg, and it's false to say it.
Mr. Tulliver's none o' my blood, and it was him quarrelled with me,
and drove me out o' the house. But perhaps you'd have had me stay and
be swore at, Mr. Glegg; perhaps you was vexed not to hear more abuse
and foul language poured out upo' your own wife. But, let me tell you,
it's _your_ disgrace."

"Did ever anybody hear the like i' this parish?" said Mr. Glegg,
getting hot. "A woman, with everything provided for her, and allowed
to keep her own money the same as if it was settled on her, and with a
gig new stuffed and lined at no end o' expense, and provided for when
I die beyond anything she could expect--to go on i' this way, biting
and snapping like a mad dog! It's beyond everything, as God A 'mighty
should ha' made women _so_." (These last words were uttered in a tone
of sorrowful agitation. Mr. Glegg pushed his tea from him, and tapped
the table with both his hands.)

"Well, Mr. Glegg, if those are your feelings, it's best they should be
known," said Mrs. Glegg, taking off her napkin, and folding it in an
excited manner. "But if you talk o' my being provided for beyond what
I could expect, I beg leave to tell you as I'd a right to expect a
many things as I don't find. And as to my being like a mad dog, it's
well if you're not cried shame on by the county for your treatment of
me, for it's what I can't bear, and I won't bear----"

Here Mrs. Glegg's voice intimated that she was going to cry, and
breaking off from speech, she rang the bell violently.

"Sally," she said, rising from her chair, and speaking in rather a
choked voice, "light a fire up-stairs, and put the blinds down. Mr.
Glegg, you'll please to order what you'd like for dinner. I shall have
gruel."

Mrs. Glegg walked across the room to the small book-case, and took
down Baxter's "Saints' Everlasting Rest," which she carried with her
up-stairs. It was the book she was accustomed to lay open before her
on special occasions,--on wet Sunday mornings, or when she heard of a
death in the family, or when, as in this case, her quarrel with Mr.
Glegg had been set an octave higher than usual.

But Mrs. Glegg carried something else up-stairs with her, which,
together with the "Saints' Rest" and the gruel, may have had some
influence in gradually calming her feelings, and making it possible
for her to endure existence on the ground-floor, shortly before
tea-time. This was, partly, Mr. Glegg's suggestion that she would do
well to let her five hundred lie still until a good investment turned
up; and, further, his parenthetic hint at his handsome provision for
her in case of his death. Mr. Glegg, like all men of his stamp, was
extremely reticent about his will; and Mrs. Glegg, in her gloomier
moments, had forebodings that, like other husbands of whom she had
heard, he might cherish the mean project of heightening her grief at
his death by leaving her poorly off, in which case she was firmly
resolved that she would have scarcely any weeper on her bonnet, and
would cry no more than if he had been a second husband. But if he had
really shown her any testamentary tenderness, it would be affecting to
think of him, poor man, when he was gone; and even his foolish fuss
about the flowers and garden-stuff, and his insistence on the subject
of snails, would be touching when it was once fairly at an end. To
survive Mr. Glegg, and talk eulogistically of him as a man who might
have his weaknesses, but who had done the right thing by her,
not-withstanding his numerous poor relations; to have sums of interest
coming in more frequently, and secrete it in various corners, baffling
to the most ingenious of thieves (for, to Mrs. Glegg's mind, banks and
strong-boxes would have nullified the pleasure of property; she might
as well have taken her food in capsules); finally, to be looked up to
by her own family and the neighborhood, so as no woman can ever hope
to be who has not the praeterite and present dignity comprised in being
a "widow well left,"--all this made a flattering and conciliatory view
of the future. So that when good Mr. Glegg, restored to good humor by
much hoeing, and moved by the sight of his wife's empty chair, with
her knitting rolled up in the corner, went up-stairs to her, and
observed that the bell had been tolling for poor Mr. Morton, Mrs.
Glegg answered magnanimously, quite as if she had been an uninjured
woman: "Ah! then, there'll be a good business for somebody to take
to."

Baxter had been open at least eight hours by this time, for it was
nearly five o'clock; and if people are to quarrel often, it follows as
a corollary that their quarrels cannot be protracted beyond certain
limits.

Mr. and Mrs. Glegg talked quite amicably about the Tullivers that
evening. Mr. Glegg went the length of admitting that Tulliver was a
sad man for getting into hot water, and was like enough to run through
his property; and Mrs. Glegg, meeting this acknowledgment half-way,
declared that it was beneath her to take notice of such a man's
conduct, and that, for her sister's sake, she would let him keep the
five hundred a while longer, for when she put it out on a mortgage she
should only get four per cent.

 Mr. and Mrs. Glegg live in the nearby town of St. Ogg's. The narrator breaks in to tell us the legend of St. Ogg, who ferried a poor woman across the river Floss one night. Turns out the poor woman was really the Virgin Mary and she blessed St. Ogg for his kindness. After this, Ogg was able to go out safely in his boat, no matter the weather, and he often rescued poor people during storms. In the present, St. Ogg's is a quiet little town with farms and mills and little shops and markets. The town doesn't think too much about its lengthy history; church-going is more a matter of habit and custom than anything else. We now arrive at the Glegg house, which has lots of windows, all the better for Mrs. Glegg to spy on her neighbors. Mr. Glegg is in the wool business and he spends his days thinking about wool, natural history, how he doesn't understand women , and how he can save money. Mr. Glegg is really good natured and finds his wife's moods confusing. He is not happy about her latest dispute with Mr. Tulliver. At breakfast, Mrs. Glegg attacks Mr. Glegg, who is totally confused. Mrs. Glegg thinks that Mr. Glegg isn't standing up for her and let Mr. Tulliver insult her. Mr. Glegg tells Mrs. Glegg to chill out and he insists that she really shouldn't call in Mr. Tulliver's debt and make him pay back his money to her now. The two get into an argument and Mrs. Glegg storms upstairs to sulk. The Gleggs take some time to cool off and, by that evening, they are getting along once more. They discuss the Tullivers again and Mrs. Glegg agrees to not make Mr. Tulliver pay back her money right now.

