THE FORTUNES AND MISFORTUNES OF MOLL FLANDERS
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for did not you give it under your hand that you was poor? and so I ought to expect you to be.'
'Well', said I, 'my dear, I am glad I have not been concerned in deceiving you before marriage. If I deceive you since, 'tis ne'er the worse; that I am poor, 'tis too true, but not so poor as to have nothing neither'; so I pulled out some bank bills and gave him about £160. 'There is something, my dear', says I, 'and not quite all neither.'
I had brought him so near to expecting nothing, by what I had said before, that the money, though the sum was small in itself, was doubly welcome; he owned it was more than he looked for, and that he did not question by my discourse to him, but that my fine clothes, gold watch, and a diamond ring or two, had been all my fortune.
I let him please himself with that £160 two or three days, and then having been abroad that day, and as if I had been to fetch it, I brought him £100 more home in gold, and told him there was a little more portion for him; and, in short, in about a week more, I brought him £180 more, and about £60 in linen, which I made him believe I had been obliged to take with the £100 which I gave him in gold, as a composition for a debt of £660, being little more than five shillings in the pound, and over valued too.
'And now, my dear', says I to him, 'I am very sorry to tell you 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, 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 for a fortune without money, and cheating a man into marrying me on pretence of it; 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 hazards 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 Virginia, to live upon his own; and often would be magnifying the way of living there, how cheap, how plentiful, how pleasant, and the like.
I began presently to understand his 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; 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 willing to go to Virginia with him and live there.
He said a thousand kind things to me upon the subject of my making such a proposal to him. He told me, that though 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, but that this offer was so kind, that it was more than he could express,
To bring the story short, we agreed to go. He told me that he had a
