Wealth & Money Quote by Helen Rowland

Rowland packs a whole era's romantic disillusionment into a clean, triptych punchline: chance, money, course. The line works because it mimics the tidy logic of a proverb while quietly sabotaging the very institutions it sounds qualified to summarize. By framing each stage of intimacy as "a matter of" something bluntly external, she drains love and marriage of their spiritual alibis and exposes the machinery underneath.

The intent is satirical but not airy. "Nowadays" is doing heavy lifting: it’s a wink at modernity as both scapegoat and evidence. In the early 20th century, love marriages were becoming the official story, yet economic dependency and rigid gender roles still wrote the terms. Rowland’s journalist eye catches the mismatch between the romantic script and the transactional reality. Love is "chance" because the culture pretends it’s spontaneous and destiny-shaped, even as social class and proximity quietly stack the deck. Matrimony is "money" because legal and financial structures made marriage a contract with high stakes, especially for women whose security was often tied to it. Divorce as "course" lands as the darkest joke: once marriage is treated like a financial arrangement, ending it becomes procedural, almost bureaucratic - the logical endpoint of a system that never centered feeling in the first place.

The subtext is less anti-love than anti-sentimentality. Rowland isn’t mourning romance; she’s puncturing the culture that sells romance while organizing life around economics, then acting surprised when the heart can’t carry the whole load.