After fifteen years of married life her husband died, bequeathing the whole of a large estate to her, and making her sole guardian of their three children,—a confidence fully justified by her conduct of the affairs thus committed to her.
“My husband trained me patiently and thoroughly,” she said to one who complimented her financial sagacity. “I was an ignoramus when we were married.”
Then, laughingly, she related the “profit and loss” incident.
It is the fashion to sneer at women’s business methods. Who are to blame for their blunders?
MONEY AS A TOY
Should your wife play with her allowance, as a child with a new toy, let censure fall upon those who have kept her in leading-strings. Teach her gradually to comprehend her responsibilities. The sense of them will steady her unless she be exceptionally feather-brained. Be she wasteful or frugal, the allowance you have made to her is as honestly hers to have, to hold or to spend, as the third of your estate which the law will give her in the event of your death.
SETTLEMENTS
“Settlements,” according to the English sense of the word, are not yet common in the United States. One American father, whose daughter was on the eve of marriage with an Englishman, ordered the prospective bridegroom out of the house when the foreigner queried innocently as to the “settlements” the future father-in-law intended to make upon his child.
A man with a reputation for fortune-hunting had nearly rid himself of the slur by insisting that his fiancée’s large estate should be settled absolutely upon herself. Her quondam guardian put a different complexion on the generous act by divulging the circumstance that the husband, by the same “settlement,” had made himself sole trustee of his wife’s property of every description.