How it opens
The house had stood six hundred years on its hill, and your family kept it by two arts, marriage and silence.
The trouble came when you were twenty, and it came in writing, over a matter in Chancery.
I will marry, sir, when I love. Not when the estate audits me.
Choose
Refuse it plainly, once, and let the plainness be your whole defense.
Refuse it, and offer to find the money some other road, by profession, by trade.
Ask for a year to consider, and pray the heiress considers elsewhere.