And yet she had always believed that the pure passion which a man gives to a woman is the greatest good in life. That she was without it had been to her a heavier trial than an unhappy home and overwhelming debts. Now, when she least expected it, it had come to her. While women in Paris were either trembling with fear for what the morrow might bring forth, or else caught in the feverish whirl of rebellion, one at least had found rest. But human happiness can never be quite perfect. Sensitiveness was a family fault with the Wollstonecrafts. It had been developed rather than suppressed in Mary by her circumstances. She was therefore keenly susceptible not only to Imlay’s love, but to his failings. Of these he had not a few. He does not seem to have been a refined man. From some remarks in Mary’s letters it may be concluded that he had at one time been very dissipated, and that the society of coarse men and women had blunted his finer instincts. His faults were peculiarly calculated to offend her. His passion had to be stimulated. His business called him away often, and his absences were unmistakably necessary to the maintenance of his devotion. The sunshine of her new life was therefore not entirely unclouded. She was by degrees obliged to lower the high pedestal on which she had placed her lover, and to admit to herself that he was not much above the level of ordinary men. This discovery did not lessen her affection, though it made her occasionally melancholy. But she was, on the whole, happy.
In September he was compelled to leave her to go to Havre, where he was detained for several months. Love had cast out all fear from her heart. She was certain that he considered himself in every sense of the word her husband; and therefore during his absence she frankly told him how much she missed him, and in her letters shared her troubles and pleasures with him. She wrote the last thing at night to tell him of her love and her loneliness. She could not take his slippers from their old place by the door. She would not look at a package of books sent to her, but said she would keep them until he could read them to her while she would mend her stockings. She drew pictures of the happy days to come when in the farm, either in America or France, to which they both looked forward as their Ultima Thule, they would spend long evenings by their fireside, perhaps with children about their knees. If Eliza sent her a worrying letter, half the worry was gone when she had confided it to him. If ne’er-do-weel Charles, temporarily prosperous or promising to be so, wrote her one that pleased her, straightway she described the delight with which he would make a friend of Imlay. When the latter had been away but a short time, she found there was to be a new tie between them. As the father of her unborn child he became doubly dear to her, while the consciousness that another life depended upon her made her more careful of her health. “This thought,” she told him, “has not only produced an overflowing of tenderness to you, but made me very attentive to calm my mind and take exercise lest I should destroy an object in whom we are to have a mutual interest, you know.” As Kegan Paul says, “No one can read her letters without seeing that she was a pure, high-minded, and refined woman, and that she considered herself, in the eyes of God and man, his wife.”
During the first part of his absence, Imlay appears to have been as devoted as she could have wished him to be. When her letters to him did not come regularly,—as indeed, how could they in those troubled days?—he grew impatient. His impatience Mary greeted as a good sign. In December she wrote:—
I am glad to find that other people can be unreasonable as well as myself, for be it known to thee, that I answered thy first letter the very night it reached me (Sunday), though thou couldst not receive it before Wednesday, because it was not sent off till the next day. There is a full, true, and particular account.
Yet I am not angry with thee, my love, for I think that it is a proof of stupidity, and, likewise, of a milk-and-water affection, which comes to the same thing, when the temper is governed by a square and compass. There is nothing picturesque in this straight-lined equality, and the passions always give grace to the actions.
Recollection now makes my heart bound to thee; but it is not to thy money-getting face, though I cannot be seriously displeased with the exertion which increases my esteem, or rather is what I should have expected from thy character. No; I have thy honest countenance before me,—Pop,—relaxed by tenderness; a little, little wounded by my whims; and thy eyes glistening with sympathy. Thy lips then feel softer than soft, and I rest my cheek on thine, forgetting all the world. I have not left the hue of love out of the picture—the rosy glow; and fancy has spread it over my own cheeks, I believe, for I feel them burning, whilst a delicious tear trembles in my eye, that would be all your own, if a grateful emotion, directed to the Father of nature, who has made me thus alive to happiness, did not give more warmth to the sentiment it divides. I must pause a moment.
Need I tell you that I am tranquil after writing thus? I do not know why, but I have more confidence in your affection when absent than present; nay, I think that you must love me, for, in the sincerity of my heart let me say it, I believe I deserve your tenderness, because I am true, and have a degree of sensibility that you can see and relish.
Yours sincerely,
Mary.
But there were days during his absence when her melancholy returned with full force. She could not but fear that the time would come when the coarse fibre of his love would work her evil. Just after he left, she wrote,—