But
although the Marshall children knew all about this crisis, as they
knew all about everything that happened to the family, they had had
no experience of the anxious talks and heartsick consultations which
would have gone on in any other faculty household. Their father had
been angry, and their mother resolute--but there was nothing new in
that. There had been, on Professor Marshall's part, belligerent,
vociferous talk about "freedom of speech," and on Mrs. Marshall's a
quiet estimate that, with her early training on a Vermont farm, and
with the high state of cultivation under which she had brought their
five acres, they could successfully go into the truck-farming
business like their neighbors. Besides this, they had the resource,
extraordinary among University families, of an account in the
savings-bank on which to fall back. They had always been able to pay
their debts and have a small surplus by the expedient of refusing to
acknowledge a tenth part of the social obligations under which
the rest of the faculty groaned and sweated with martyr's pride.
Perfidiously refusing to do their share in the heart-breaking struggle
to "keep up the dignity" of the academic profession, they were not
overwhelmed by the super-human difficulties of that undertaking.
So it happened that the Marshall children heard no forebodings about
the future, but only heated statements of what seemed to their father
the right of a teacher to say what he believed.
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