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124 making. The English who remained in Paris ran the chance from day to day of being arrested with the priests and aristocrats, and even of being carried to the guillotine. Their only safeguard lay in obscurity. They had, above all else, to evade the notice of Government officers. Mary, if she married Imlay, would be obliged to proclaim herself a British subject, and would thus be risking imprisonment, and perhaps death. Besides, it was very doubtful whether a marriage ceremony performed by the French authorities would be recognized in England as valid.

To Mary, however, this did not seem an insurmountable obstacle to their union. "Her view had now become," Mr. Kegan Paul says, "that mutual affection was marriage, and that the marriage tie should not bind after the death of love, if love should die." In her Vindication she had upheld the sanctity of marriage because she believed that the welfare of society depends upon the order maintained in family relations; but her belief also was that the form the law demands is nothing, the feeling which leads those concerned to desire it, everything. What she had hitherto seen of married life, as at present instituted, was not calculated to make her think highly of it. Her mother and her friend's mother had led the veriest dogs' lives because the law would not permit them to leave brutal and sensual husbands, whom they had ceased to honour or love. Her sister had been driven mad by the ill-treatment of a man to whom she was bound by legal, but not by natural ties. Probably in London other cases had come within her notice. Love was the one unimportant element in the marriage compact. The artificial tone of society had disgusted all the more earnest thinkers