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Updated: May 20, 2025
It is better for a portionless girl to go to the altar in a travelling dress, and to send out no sort of invitations or wedding cards, than to allow the groom to pay for them. This is not to the disparagement of the rights of the groom. It is simply a proper and universal etiquette.
This big fellow had lately left college, and although he had only completed his nineteenth year, he was on the point of marrying a portionless young girl, Charlotte Desvignes, for whom he had conceived a romantic attachment ever since childhood. His parents, seeing in this match a renewal of their own former loving improvidence, had felt moved, and unwilling to drive the lad to despair.
She was an orphan, daughter of a Virginia planter who had been eaten into poverty by his own slaves, so that his children were left portionless, and had been married when young to one of those high-minded, gallant spirits, who bear their country's flag so proudly on the wave brave, and generous to a fault, and in fact one of those who almost literally "spend half a crown out of six-pence a day."
"If you only could know the brightness of the hopes you have shattered, and the purity of that girl's affection for yourself!" It was then that an idea a low-minded idea occurred to Lord Rufford. While all this was going on he had of course made various inquiries about this branch of the Trefoil family and had learned that Arabella was altogether portionless.
From this dream he had only been awakened, two or three years before, by an attachment he had formed to the portionless daughter of an earl; and the Grange being too far encumbered to allow him the proper settlements which the lady's family required, it became a matter of importance to ascertain Sir Miles's intentions.
Yet, since to have refused at once for her portionless daughter a man in so high a position, and to whom her own obligations were so great, was impossible, she adopted a policy, admirable for the craft of its conception and the dexterity of its execution. In exacting the condition of a year's delay, she made her motives appear so loftily disinterested, so magnanimously friendly!
She was as insignificant, and perhaps as portionless, as Isabella; and if the heir of the Tilney property had not grandeur and wealth enough in himself, at what point of interest were the demands of his younger brother to rest?
"Tell me not that you or he have the presumption to think that my son William Cavendish or even Edward Talbot will ever cast an eye on a mere portionless country maid, not comely, nor even like the Hardwickes or the Talbots. If I thought so for a moment, never shouldst thou darken these doors again, thou ungrateful, treacherous woman."
Sure he lives at Mrs Vanhomrigh's, so often is he there; and Hessy is as pretty a girl as eye can see, in her young twenties and a bit of a fortune to boot. I have ever said the Doctor was not on the market for nothing. He is not the man for a portionless beauty.
Nothing had ever occurred to change the monotonous order of his existence, for no event affected him except the work of his office, perquisites, gratuities, and promotion. He never spoke of anything but of his duties, either at the office, or at home he had married the portionless daughter of one of his colleagues.
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