Wealth & Money Quote by Helen Rowland

Rowland takes a well-worn proverb about separation and gives it a social life. Swapping "parted" for "courted" turns a moral warning into a predatory rom-com: the fool isn’t simply destined to lose money; she’s surrounded by suitors the moment she has it. The joke lands because it reframes financial gullibility as a kind of unwanted attention, a marketplace where cash functions like perfume.

The gendered twist matters. By choosing "her", Rowland needles the era’s chivalric scripts, where men performed romance as transaction and women were expected to be both dazzled and dependent. The line implies that the fool’s mistake isn’t only bad arithmetic, but believing the performance: attention that appears affectionate but is really acquisitive. "Courted" is soft language for hard extraction, a verb that lets the predator keep his manners.

As a journalist in early 20th-century America, Rowland wrote during a boom of consumer advertising, hustle culture, and upward-mobility mythmaking, when persuasion was becoming industrialized. Her wit is compact and cynical in the way good column writing has to be: a single pivot that exposes an ecosystem. The subtext isn’t that women are uniquely foolish; it’s that people with money, especially those trained to read flattery as love, attract an entire economy of charmers.

It’s also a warning about visibility: wealth doesn’t just buy things, it makes you legible to opportunists. Rowland’s punchline is basically a sociological observation with lipstick on.