AITA for not intervening sooner in the suspicious union of my friend’s (50M) daughter (18F) to a gold-digger (45M)?

Throughout the narratives of both Walter Hartright and Vincent Gilmore, Limmeredge House is shown to have a profoundly transformative effect on those who visit. Particularly in these cases, Wilkie Collins introduces the narrator as an upright man whose appearance at the house pertains to a specific undertaking. However, as Mr. Gilmore demonstrates during his account of his visit, the expectation-defying natures of the house’s inhabitants have a way of altering the perspectives of its visitors. “In the case of any other client,” Mr. Gilmore writes, “I should have acted on my instructions, however personally distasteful to me,” (Collins 154). From his introduction, Mr. Gilmore is presented as a man of business and refinement. When it comes to Miss Fairlie, on the contrary, “[he cannot] do with this business-like indifference,” (154). Interestingly, the word “cannot” is chosen rather than one suggesting any level of agency. In a rare moment where Mr. Gilmore is denying that which is asked of him, the writing implies an unusual lack of personal involvement or choice. Collins immediately shifts into an uncharacteristically-emotional recollection of Mr. Gilmore’s longtime relationship with the fairlies. Though Mr. Gilmore has mentioned, in passing, his long relationship with the family, it has never been in such depth or length. Mr. Gilmore’s reverie ultimately leads him to the conclusion that “writing a second time to Mr. Fairlie was not to be thought of” (154). For the time, Mr. Gilmore’s choice to go behind the eyes of his client’s male guardian is very much subversive, and hallmarks an important change in his thinking that culminates in his argument with Mr. Fairlie.