The Great Train Robbery by Michael Crichton

need for more. Her other choices were much less appealing: she might be a shop assistant, a clerk, a telegraphist, or a nurse, but all these occupations were more suitable for an ambitious lower-class woman than a firmly established gentlewoman of quality.
    If a young woman refused such demeaning work, her spinsterhood implied a considerable financial burden upon the household. Miss Emily Downing observed that “the daughters of professional men … cannot but feel themselves a burden and a drag on the hard-won earnings of their fathers; they must know—if they allow themselves to think at all—that they are a constant cause of anxiety, and that should they not get married, there is every probability of their being, sooner or later,obliged to enter the battle of life utterly unprepared and unfitted for the fight.”
    In short, there was intense pressure for marriage—any sort of decent marriage—felt by fathers and daughters alike. The Victorians tended to marry relatively late, in their twenties or thirties, but Mr. Edgar Trent had a daughter Elizabeth, now twenty-nine and of “wholly marriageable condition”—meaning somewhat past her prime. It could not have escaped Mr. Trent’s attention that the red-bearded gentleman might be in need of a wife. The gentleman himself expressed no reluctance to marry, but rather had indicated that the exigencies of business had kept him from pursuing personal happiness. Thus there was no reason to believe that this well-dressed, evidently well-to-do young man with a sporting instinct might not be drawn to Elizabeth. With this in mind, Mr. Trent contrived to invite Mr. Pierce to his house in Brook Street for Sunday tea, on the pretext of discussing the purchase of a fighting dog from Mr. Pierce. Mr. Pierce, somewhat reluctantly, accepted the invitation.
    Elizabeth Trent was not called as a witness at the trial of Pierce, out of deference to her finer sensibilities. But popular accounts of the time give us an accurate picture of her. She was of medium height, rather darker in complexion than was the fashion, and her features were, in the words of one observer, “regular enough without being what one might call pretty.” Then, as now, journalists were inclined to exaggerate the beauty of any woman involved in a scandalous event, so that the absence of compliments about Miss Trent’s appearance probably implies “an unfortunate aspect.”
    She apparently had few suitors, save for those openly ambitious fellows eager to marry a banker’s daughter, and these she staunchly rejected, with her father’s undoubtedly mixed blessing. But she must surely havebeen impressed with Pierce, that “dashing, intrepid, fine figure of a man with charm to burn.”
    By all accounts, Pierce was equally impressed by the young lady. A servant’s testimony records their initial meeting, which reads as if it came from the pages of a Victorian novel.
    Mr. Pierce was taking tea on the rear lawn with Mr. Trent and Mrs. Trent, an “acknowledged beauty of the town.” They watched as bricklayers in the back yard patiently erected a ruined building, while nearby a gardener planted picturesque weeds. This was the last gasp of a nearly one-hundred-year English fascination with ruins; they were still so fashionable that everyone who could afford a decent ruin installed one on his grounds.
    Pierce watched the workmen for a while. “What is it to be?” he inquired.
    “We thought a water mill,” Mrs. Trent said. “It will be so delightful, especially if there is the rusted curve of the waterwheel itself. Don’t you think so?”
    “We are building the rusted wheel at a goodly expense,” Mr. Trent grumbled.
    “It is being constructed of previously rusted metal, saving us a good deal of bother,” Mrs. Trent added. “But of course we must wait for the weeds to grow up around the site before it takes on the proper appearance.”
    At that moment Elizabeth arrived, wearing white crinoline. “Ah, my darling