Courting and the Courts. the courts should hold, as they do, that prin ciples of tender do not apply; that it is enough without saying obtidit se at all, if the lady is temper parata. Coke says it is not to be ex pected that a lady should say to a gentleman: "I am ready to marry you; pray, marrv me." Where the defendant asked the hand of the lady in the presence of the latter's mother, who consented, and the lady said nothing, and the defendant thereupon gently took the hand of the mother and touchingly said: "Henceforth consider me as your son," it was held sufficient proof of the lady's con sent; and in a New York case the lady was permitted to show that she had procured a wedding dress and had gone so far as to get a wedding cake, as showing her acceptance, while in Iowa the plaintiff was allowed to prove in support of hef acceptance that she was making preparation for her marriage "piecing quilts and doing fancy work," and that when she heard of defendant's mar riage, "she hated it awful bad." While the law makes it easy to prove a proposal by the gentleman and equally easy to show that the lady accepted, when it comes to evidence showing a release on the part of the lady, then the proof must be strong to sustain the defence. In one case a bachelor of fifty-three had been paying his respects to a maiden of fortythree summers for the unlucky period of thirteen years. During all this time she de clared to others that she would never marry him and spoke of him in terms of derision and contempt. After thirteen years of court ship, the bachelor summoned sufficient cour
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age to propose and was promptly accepted. After the engagement he heard of the double dealings of the maid and refused to marry her. The court held that it was no defence to the action, although it might go in mitiga tion of damages. In a Pennsylvania case, the lady wrote the defendant a letter in which she said: "I don't want you, for I know that I would have a devil's life of it. If you were any kind of a gentleman, you would not act as you have. I pray night and day that you may never prosper in this world. I just pray for every hair in your head to come out." And yet she recovered a judgment for $2,000. In looking beneath the surface for the reason for this verdict, it is quite evident that the jury believed that the lady was goaded to desperation by the attentions of her nance to her rival, and that she did not in fact mean to say that she did not want to marry him, and did not really desire that he lose all his hair, for in her letter she says cruelly of her rival: "Well, if I am poor, I do not wear the one hat for five or six years, like she does, and turn it hind part before, like she does." True it is that "Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned." Under the weight of authority, then, if a party does not want to find himself, in the eyes of the law, an engaged man, he must look well to his daily walk and conversation; for, if he has so conducted himself as to be estopped from denying the engagement, he will have a difficult problem to convince a judge and jury that the lady has duly re leased him. The maxim applicable seems to be carcat amatar.
