for them--something of the annuity kind I mean.--My sisters
would feel the good effects of it as well as herself.
A hundred a year would make them all perfectly comfortable."

His wife hesitated a little, however, in giving
her consent to this plan.

"To be sure," said she, "it is better than parting with
fifteen hundred pounds at once. But, then, if Mrs. Dashwood
should live fifteen years we shall be completely taken in."

"Fifteen years! my dear Fanny; her life cannot
be worth half that purchase."

"Certainly not; but if you observe, people always
live for ever when there is an annuity to be paid them;
and she is very stout and healthy, and hardly forty.
An annuity is a very serious business; it comes over
and over every year, and there is no getting rid
of it. You are not aware of what you are doing.
I have known a great deal of the trouble of annuities;
for my mother was clogged with the payment of three
to old superannuated servants by my father's will,
and it is amazing how disagreeable she found it.
Twice every year these annuities were to be paid; and then
there was the trouble of getting it to them; and then one
of them was said to have died, and afterwards it turned
out to be no such thing. My mother was quite sick of it.
Her income was not her own, she said, with such perpetual
claims on it; and it was the more unkind in my father,