VOLUME I
4. CHAPTER IV
(continued)
"Six years hence! Dear Miss Woodhouse, he would be thirty years old!"
"Well, and that is as early as most men can afford to marry,
who are not born to an independence. Mr. Martin, I imagine,
has his fortune entirely to make--cannot be at all beforehand with
the world. Whatever money he might come into when his father died,
whatever his share of the family property, it is, I dare say,
all afloat, all employed in his stock, and so forth; and though,
with diligence and good luck, he may be rich in time, it is next to
impossible that he should have realised any thing yet."
"To be sure, so it is. But they live very comfortably.
They have no indoors man, else they do not want for any thing;
and Mrs. Martin talks of taking a boy another year."
"I wish you may not get into a scrape, Harriet, whenever he does
marry;--I mean, as to being acquainted with his wife--for though
his sisters, from a superior education, are not to be altogether
objected to, it does not follow that he might marry any body at all fit
for you to notice. The misfortune of your birth ought to make you
particularly careful as to your associates. There can be no doubt
of your being a gentleman's daughter, and you must support your
claim to that station by every thing within your own power, or there
will be plenty of people who would take pleasure in degrading you."
"Yes, to be sure, I suppose there are. But while I visit
at Hartfield, and you are so kind to me, Miss Woodhouse,
I am not afraid of what any body can do."
"You understand the force of influence pretty well, Harriet; but I
would have you so firmly established in good society, as to be
independent even of Hartfield and Miss Woodhouse. I want to see you
permanently well connected, and to that end it will be advisable
to have as few odd acquaintance as may be; and, therefore, I say
that if you should still be in this country when Mr. Martin marries,
I wish you may not be drawn in by your intimacy with the sisters,
to be acquainted with the wife, who will probably be some mere
farmer's daughter, without education."
|