Very naturally being Christians did not affect this relationship. No white man would really marry a dark girl were she beautiful as the rising dawn. A white lover meant advancement in a coloured girl's world, and she in her turn often gained great influence over the man who had chosen her. Indeed the majority of these women were faithful, tender and loving. They were not always the wisest of housekeepers, I am afraid--how should they be--and the Great House so managed was apt to be dirty, untidy, wasteful, slatternly. Its mistress had never seen anything better, had seldom had a chance to train. The position grew to be accepted as the best for a coloured girl, infinitely preferable to that of matrimony with one of her own shade. There was no loss of caste, indeed the girl gained by being associated with the white man. It came to be that the man would give a bond to pay down a certain sum upon his marrying or leaving the island to the girl he had chosen for his temporary mate, and it not infrequently happened that this sum was so great that he was virtually unable ever to leave her. They say that many a coloured man made such a bargain for his daughter. But this was in the days when life was easier for the slave, when a coloured man had some rights, even though no white man would sit at meat with him or marry his daughter. It was sometimes very hard on the children of such alliances. Madden gives a vivid account of a visit he paid to an estate that had belonged to an uncle of his, and that had been mismanaged and gone to wrack and ruin.