Mrs Glegg had both a front and a back parlour in her excellent house at St Ogg's, so that she had two points of view from which she could observe the weaknesses of her fellow-beings and reinforce her thankfulness for her own exceptional strength of mind.From her front windows 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 labour as a dissipation, and habitually relaxed by doing the work of two ordinary gardeners.The economising 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 clue 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 him-self 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 flavour 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 him-self was stingy in the most amiable manner: his neighbours 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 neutralising of misfortune.
And Mr Glegg was just as fond of saving other people's money as his own:
