Note 20 — CHAP. XIII.

It is difficult to avoid blaming the offices. These large and varied insurances were, probably, known to every company in existence. The reasons assigned should have been tested, and very little trouble would have shut the door of every office in London on Wainwright and his companions. For so much money to be risked on the life of a girl of twenty-one, described as “remarkably healthy, whose life was one of a thousand,” and that too for only two years, merely because a nominal plea of insurable interest was given, was neglectful and almost culpable; although there is some extenuation in the fact that this lady assisted to deceive by uttering, or at least coinciding in a false statement to Mr. Ingall, at the Imperial, is certain. The slightest inquiry would have discovered that Wainwright was a beggar, that this young lady had no direct or indirect interest in any property whatever, and that the premiums must have been paid with some sinister purpose by a man steeped in difficulties and overwhelmed with debt, on the life of a healthy but most unhappy girl, entirely under his control.