“During the remainder of the evening, my uncle’s tenderness led him frequently to revert to the subject, and utter, with increasing warmth, sentiments to the same purport.  At length it was necessary to say ’Farewell!’—­and we parted—­gracious God! to meet no more.”

CHAPTER 11

“A GENTLEMAN of large fortune and of polished manners, had lately visited very frequently at our house, and treated me, if possible, with more respect than Mr. Venables paid him; my pregnancy was not yet visible, his society was a great relief to me, as I had for some time past, to avoid expence, confined myself very much at home.  I ever disdained unnecessary, perhaps even prudent concealments; and my husband, with great ease, discovered the amount of my uncle’s parting present.  A copy of a writ was the stale pretext to extort it from me; and I had soon reason to believe that it was fabricated for the purpose.  I acknowledge my folly in thus suffering myself to be continually imposed on.  I had adhered to my resolution not to apply to my uncle, on the part of my husband, any more; yet, when I had received a sum sufficient to supply my own wants, and to enable me to pursue a plan I had in view, to settle my younger brother in a respectable employment, I allowed myself to be duped by Mr. Venables’ shallow pretences, and hypocritical professions.

“Thus did he pillage me and my family, thus frustrate all my plans of usefulness.  Yet this was the man I was bound to respect and esteem:  as if respect and esteem depended on an arbitrary will of our own!  But a wife being as much a man’s property as his horse, or his ass, she has nothing she can call her own.  He may use any means to get at what the law considers as his, the moment his wife is in possession of it, even to the forcing of a lock, as Mr. Venables did, to search for notes in my writing-desk—­and all this is done with a show of equity, because, forsooth, he is responsible for her maintenance.

“The tender mother cannot lawfully snatch from the gripe of the gambling spendthrift, or beastly drunkard, unmindful of his offspring, the fortune which falls to her by chance; or (so flagrant is the injustice) what she earns by her own exertions.  No; he can rob her with impunity, even to waste publicly on a courtezan; and the laws of her country—­if women have a country—­afford her no protection or redress from the oppressor, unless she have the plea of bodily fear; yet how many ways are there of goading the soul almost to madness, equally unmanly, though not so mean?  When such laws were framed, should not impartial lawgivers have first decreed, in the style of a great assembly, who recognized the existence of an etre supreme, to fix the national belief, that the husband should always be wiser and more virtuous than his wife, in order to entitle him, with a show of justice, to keep this idiot, or perpetual minor, for ever in bondage.  But I must have done—­on this subject, my indignation continually runs away with me.