It is declared that a good wife is a crown to her husband, but Mrs.Crawley had been much more than a crown to him.

As had regarded all the inner life of the man,--all that portion of his life which had not been passed in the pulpit or in pastoral teaching,--she had been crown, throne, and sceptre all in one.

That she had endured with him and on his behalf the miseries of poverty, and the troubles of a life which had known no smiles, is perhaps not to be alleged as much to her honour.
She had joined herself to him for better or worse, and it was her manifest duty to bear such things; wives always have to bear them, knowing when they marry that they must take their chance.

Mr.Crawley might have been a bishop, and Mrs.Crawley, when she married him, perhaps thought it probable that such would be his fortune.

Instead of that he was now, just as he was approaching his fiftieth year, a perpetual curate, with an income of one hundred and thirty pounds per annum,--and a family.