The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders
Page 62'And now, my dear,' says I to him, 'I am very sorry to tell you, that
there is all, and that I have given you my whole fortune.' I added,
that if the person who had my #600 had not abused me, I had been worth
#1000 to him, but that as it was, I had been faithful to him, and
reserved nothing to myself, but if it had been more he should have had
it.
He was so obliged by the manner, and so pleased with the sum, for he
had been in a terrible fright lest it had been nothing at all, that he
accepted it very thankfully. And thus I got over the fraud of passing
pretence of a fortune; which, by the way, I take to be one of the most
dangerous steps a woman can take, and in which she runs the most hazard
of being ill-used afterwards.
My husband, to give him his due, was a man of infinite good nature, but
he was no fool; and finding his income not suited to the manner of
living which he had intended, if I had brought him what he expected,
and being under a disappointment in his return of his plantations in
Virginia, he discovered many times his inclination of going over to
of living there, how cheap, how plentiful, how pleasant, and the like.
I began presently to understand this meaning, and I took him up very
plainly one morning, and told him that I did so; that I found his
estate turned to no account at this distance, compared to what it would
do if he lived upon the spot, and that I found he had a mind to go and
live there; and I added, that I was sensible he had been disappointed
in a wife, and that finding his expectations not answered that way, I
could do no less, to make him amends, than tell him that I was very
He said a thousand kind things to me upon the subject of my making such
a proposal to him. He told me, that however he was disappointed in his
expectations of a fortune, he was not disappointed in a wife, and that
I was all to him that a wife could be, and he was more than satisfied
on the whole when the particulars were put together, but that this
offer was so kind, that it was more than he could express.