Chapter 17

said that she improved him, and his mother said the same; so that she rejoined in her influence, which seemed to bear such good results.

Miss Rennie, who had heard when in ----shire, a somewhat exaggerated account of young Dalzell's attachment to Miss Melville, was very much disgusted with his conduct, and though his attentions to Laura Wilson amused her very much, she had a grudge at him for their mercenary motives. Laura was evidently captivated at first sight; she could speak of nobody but Mr. Dalzell, and Mr. Rennie as her guardian was a little alarmed, but on inquiry he found that Moss Tower was not very deeply dipped after all; Mrs. Dalzell had her jointure off it, but he was an only son, and any little wildness or extravagance of youth was likely to be put an end to by marriage. Laura was a somewhat troublesome ward, so passionate and so self-willed that even at school she had carried her point against him by sheer determination over and over again, and he wished heartily to be well freed of her by marriage with a tolerably respectable man. Her fortune he would secure her future husband from making ducks and drakes of by settlements, which are generally in Britain framed as if the future husband was an enemy to be dreaded, and not a friend to be trusted. For the law as it stands puts such enormous power, not only over happiness (which is inevitable), but over property and liberty, into the hands of the husband, to be used against as well as for the advantage of the wife, that it is only by taking power from both, and vesting it in trustees, that money can be saved for the wife and children. In the cases where the marriage is a happy one, the settlement is a hindrance and a nuisance; but in such cases as that of William Dalzell and Laura Wilson, it would be prudent to evade the law of the land, and to preserve the property of the heiress by such means.