Page:Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin (Pennell, 1885).djvu/210

194 willing enough to be civil. Marriage, in his opinion, had restored Mary to respectability. "You have not, perhaps, heard," he wrote to a friend, "that the assertrix of female rights has given her hand to the balancier of political justice." He not only called on Mrs. Godwin, but he dined with her; an experiment, however, which did not prove pleasurable, for Horne Tooke, Curran, and Grattan were of the party, and they discussed politics. Fuseli, who loved nothing better than to talk, had never a chance to say a word. "I wonder you invited me to meet such wretched company," he exclaimed to Mary in disgust.

Mary's family were not so cordial. Everina and Mrs. Bishop apparently never quite forgave her for the letter she wrote after her return to England with Imlay, and they disapproved of her marriage. They complained that her strange course of conduct made it doubly difficult for them, as her sisters, to find situations. When, shortly after the marriage, Godwin went to stay a day or two at Etruria, Everina, who was then governess in the Wedgwood household, would not at first come down to see him, and, as far as can be judged from his letters, treated him very coolly throughout his visit.

Godwin and Mary now made their joint home in the Polygon, Somer's Town. But the former had his separate lodgings in the Evesham Buildings, where he went every morning to work, and where he sometimes spent the night. They saw little, if any, more of each other than they had before, and were as independent in their goings-out and comings-in.

While Mary seconded Godwin in his domestic theories, there were times when less independence would