I was just thinking about Mrs. Price. We assume Wentworth would have made his fortune because he did.

But how could anyone have known that? I am in a muddle I think this book is meant to cause.

The advice was not bad advice in general. It really is not. I can't get around that. We generally see prudence as a good thing.

Recommendation of prudence to a young couple consisting of a pretty young girl who is not very experienced and very much alienated in her current home and a headstrong and charsmatic young man who has spent whatever good fortune sent his way.

Not exactly a sure recipe for success.

And yet it isn't the right advice - but why? Would it have been better to say nothing? To let Anne have her way? Should they have waited? Should Anne have stood up and defied the wishes of everyone she to whom she owed duty and felt affection? Can any man be expected to come back and try again after being so dismissed and clearly unwanted?

On the other hand - Anne would not have starved. She would have been loved. They would have had a chance.

And most disturbingly - Lady Russell never seems to have either the power or the desire to make sure Anne is seen more in the wider world. So if Lady Russell was not willing or able to show Anne to the world, what made her think that anyone would see Anne in a small community with so few choices that CHarles Musgrove started to look like a catch? Looking back, it was a miracle Wentowrth fell out of the sky and right on top of Anne.