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.

"The company of the gentleman I have already mentioned, who had a general
acquaintance with literature and subjects of taste, was grateful to me;
my countenance brightened up as he approached, and I unaffectedly
expressed the pleasure I felt. The amusement his conversation afforded
me, made it easy to comply with my husband's request, to endeavour to
render our house agreeable to him.

"His attentions became more pointed; but, as I was not of the number of
women, whose virtue, as it is termed, immediately takes alarm, I
endeavoured, rather by raillery than serious expostulation, to give a
different turn to his conversation.