Some consumer advice: do not sell your daughter for a bottle of 90-year-old port

Port, or Hermitage? This does not refer to personal consumption. I was trying to remember Meredith’s Egoist, in which one of the principal characters seeks to coerce his daughter into marriage, in order to have unlimited access to his putative son-in-law’s ancient wines. That could give rise to an interesting moral speculation.

I raised the question in a club, one of the few surviving places in Britain where free speech is possible. There was a desire for further and better particulars: which wine were we talking about, and what about the daughter? Was she an easy-on-the-eye, generally obedient creature, a pleasure to have about the place, or…. Someone quoted Lord Tottering, from one of those splendid cartoons in Country Life. At a party, Tottering and a chum are confronted by a roomful of gyrating teenage females. His Lordship comes to a conclusion: ‘The number of daughters a chap has must be related to his wickedness in a previous existence.’