Page:Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin (Pennell, 1885).djvu/146

130 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 was mending 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