FANNY.

[The days were not yet, either in England or America, when a married
woman could claim or hold, independently, money which she either
earned or inherited. How infinite a relief from bitter injustice and
hardship has been the legislation that has enabled women to hold and
own independently property left to them by kindred or friends, or
earned by their own industry and exertions. I think, however, the
excellent law-makers of the United States must have been intent upon
atoning for all the injustice of the previous centuries of English
legislation with regard to women's property, when they framed the
laws which, I am told, obtain in some of the States, by which women
may not only hold bequests left to them, and earnings gained by
them, entirely independent of their husbands; but being thus
generously secured in their own rights, are still allowed to demand
their maintenance, and the payment of their debts, by the men they
are married to. This seems to me beyond all right and reason--the
compensation of one gross injustice by another, a process almost
_womanly_ in its enthusiastic unfairness. It must be retrospective
amends for incalculable former wrongs, I suppose.]

MORTIMER STREET, November 17th, 1845.

When I consider that this is the third letter I write to you this
blessed day, dear Hal, I cannot help thinking myself a funny woman; and
that if you are as fond of me as you pretend to be, you ought to be much
obliged to the "streak of madness" which compels me to such preposterous
epistolary exertions.

And so because the sea rages and roars against the coast at St.
Leonard's, and appals your eyes and ears there, my dearest Hal, you
think we had better not cross the Atlantic now. But the storms on that
tremendous ocean are so _local_, so to speak, that vessels steering the
same course and within comparatively small distance of each other have
often different weather and do not experience the same tempests.
Moreover, Mrs. Macready has just been here, who tells me that her
husband crossed last year rather earlier than I did, in October, and had
a horrible passage; and the last time I came to England we sailed on the
1st of December, and had a long but by no means bad voyage. There is no
certainty about it, though, to be sure, strong probability of
unfavorable weather at this season of the year....

I t