“It is further my wish, and I hereby stipulate that my said daughter, Lucy, shall contract no marriage up to the age hereinafter mentioned without the consent of the following parties, who will consider themselves as a sort of committee for the disposal of her hand, and whom I hereby appoint and constitute her guardians, so far as this subject is concerned; it being fully understood that this appointment does not confer any power or authority over her pecuniary concerns. The committee which I thus charge with the arrangement of her marriage is to consist of the three persons above mentioned, to wit, Dame Elena Randolph, Richard Ford, and Susan Ford, his wife, with the following assessors added: Robert Rushton, Esq., town clerk of Farafield, my old friend; the Rev. William Williamson, of the Congregational Chapel, my pastor; and Mrs. Maria Stone, school-mistress, of the same place--” “But, Mr. Trevor!” Ford ejaculated with a gasp. The paragraph he had just listened to took away his breath. “Well? out with your objections; let us hear them,” said old Trevor, turning upon him, brisk and lively, and ready for war. “Objections! yes, I can not deny it, I have objections,” said Ford, hesitating. “Mr. Trevor, you know better than I do, you that have had such quantities of money passing through your hands; but--” “Out with it,” said Trevor; he rubbed his hands. It was an amusement the more to him to have his arrangements questioned. “You can’t have taken everything into consideration. Six people--_six_, all so different. If she has to get all their consents, she will never marry at all.” “And no great harm done either,” said old Trevor briefly, “if that is all. Why should she marry? A woman who is poor, who wants somebody to work for her, that is comprehensible; but a woman with a lot of money, there is no reason why she shouldn’t stay as she is. What should she get married for?” Ford scratched his head; he did not quite make it out. This was a challenge to all his convictions. It touched, he felt, the very first prerogative of man. Where were all true foundations of primal supremacy and authority to go to, if it were once set up as a rule that marriage was no longer necessary to womankind? “It’s always a good thing for a woman to marry,” he said hoarsely. Many a radical opinion he had heard from his lodger, but never anything so sweeping as this. “Ah! you think so,” said old Trevor. “There was poor Lucilla, to go no further. She might have been alive yet, and enjoying her good fortune, if she had not married me.” This disturbed still more the man of orthodox ideas; he could do nothing but stare at the old revolutionary. What might he not say next? “I suppose,” he said, after awhile, “poor Lucilla would never have hesitated; she was a woman who never considered her own comfort, in comparison with doing her duty.”