The Squire put his arm within Marks’s. “You must have a bit of a struggle to get along, too, on your small salary.”
“True: and it all helps. Work and struggle together are not the most desirable combination. But for being obliged to increase my means by some stratagem or other, I should not have taken on the additional evening’s work.”
“How long are you at it, now, of an evening?”
“Usually about two hours. On Saturdays and at Christmas-time longer.”
“And I suppose you must continue this night-work?”
“Yes. I get fifty pounds a year for it. And I assure you I should not know how to spare one pound of the fifty. No one knows the expenses of children, except those who have to look at every shilling before it can be spent.”
There was a pause. Mr. Marks stooped, plucked a cowslip and held it to his lips.
“Don’t you think, Marks,” resumed the Squire, in a confidential, friendly tone, “that you were just a little imprudent to marry?”
“No, I do not think I was,” he replied slowly, as if considering the question. “I did not marry very early: I was eight-and-twenty; and I had got together the wherewithal to furnish a house, and something in hand besides. The question was mooted among us at Brown’s the other day—whether it was wiser, or not, for young clerks to marry. There is a great deal to be urged both ways—against marrying and against remaining single.”
“What can you urge against remaining single?”