Yet it has not
even begun to be practised. If any thought is taken at all of this
contingency, 'general intelligence' is still relied upon. There are,
however, other ways of facing the future.
In France, as everybody knows, no girl born of respectable parents is
unprovided with a _dot_; there is no family, however poor, which does
not strive and save in order to find their daughter some kind of
_dot_. If she has no _dot_, she remains unmarried. The amount of the
_dot_ is determined by the social position of the parents. No marriage
is arranged without the _dot_ forming an important part of the
business. No bride goes empty-handed out of her father's house. And
since families in France are much smaller than in this country, a much
smaller proportion of girls go unmarried.
In this country no girls of the lower class, and few of the middle
class, ever have any _dot_ at all. They go to their husbands
empty-handed, unless, as sometimes happens, the father makes an
allowance to the daughter. All they have is their expectation of what
may come to them after the father's death, when there will be
insurances and savings to be divided. The daughter who marries has no
_dot_. The daughter who remains unmarried has no fortune until her
father dies: very often she has none after that event.
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