Quotes About Dowerless

Though religious houses had long had a reputation for being both prisons and hotbeds of vice, they had always served as homes for the many surplus, unmarried, dowerless women who, lacking families to support them, would otherwise have lived out their lives in lonely, hopeless poverty.

But if you were free today, tomorrow, yesterday, can even I believe that you would choose a dowerless girl, you who, in your very confidence with her, weigh everything by Gain: or, choosing her, if for a moment you were false enough to your one guiding principle to do so, do I not know that your repentance and regret would surely follow?