108.  If this be the case amongst the opulent, who have estates to draw upon, what must be the consequences of a want of frugality in the middle and lower ranks of life?  Here it must be fatal, and especially amongst that description of persons whose wives have, in many cases, the receiving as well as the expending of money.  In such a case, there wants nothing but extravagance in the wife to make ruin as sure as the arrival of old age.  To obtain security against this is very difficult; yet, if the lover be not quite blind, he may easily discover a propensity towards extravagance.  The object of his addresses will, nine times out of ten, not be the manager of a house; but she must have her dress, and other little matters under her control.  If she be costly in these; if, in these, she step above her rank, or even to the top of it; if she purchase all she is able to purchase, and prefer the showy to the useful, the gay and the fragile to the less sightly and more durable, he may be sure that the disposition will cling to her through life.  If he perceive in her a taste for costly food, costly furniture, costly amusements; if he find her love of gratification to be bounded only by her want of means; if he find her full of admiration of the trappings of the rich, and of desire to be able to imitate them, he may be pretty sure that she will not spare his purse, when once she gets her hand into it; and, therefore, if he can bid adieu to her charms, the sooner he does it the better.

109.  The outward and visible and vulgar signs of extravagance are rings, broaches, bracelets, buckles, necklaces, diamonds (real or mock), and, in short, all the hard-ware which women put upon their persons.  These things may be proper enough in palaces, or in scenes resembling palaces; but, when they make their appearance amongst people in the middle rank of life, where, after all, they only serve to show that poverty in the parties which they wish to disguise; when the nasty, mean, tawdry things make their appearance in this rank of life, they are the sure indications of a disposition that will always be straining at what it can never attain.  To marry a girl of this disposition is really self-destruction.  You never can have either property or peace.  Earn her a horse to ride, she will want a gig:  earn the gig, she will want a chariot:  get her that, she will long for a coach and four:  and, from stage to stage, she will torment you to the end of her or your days; for, still there will be somebody with a finer equipage than you can give her; and, as long as this is the case, you will never have rest.  Reason would tell her, that she could never be at the top; that she must stop at some point short of that; and that, therefore, all expenses in the rivalship are so much thrown away.  But, reason and broaches and bracelets do not go in company: