Page:Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin (Pennell, 1885).djvu/42

26 than Everina, had had even less education, solved her present problem by marrying, but she escaped one difficulty only to fall into another still greater and more serious. The history of her married experience is important because of the part Mary played in it. The latter's independent conduct, in her sister's regard, is a foreshadowing of the course she pursued at a later period in the management of her own affairs.

Eliza was the most excitable and nervous of the three sisters. The family sensitiveness was developed in her to a painful degree. She was not only quick to take offence, but was ever on the look-out for slights and insults even from people she dearly loved. She assumed a defensive attitude against the world and mankind, and therefore life went harder with her than with more cheerfully constituted women. Her indignation and rage were not so easily appeased as aroused. Altogether, she was a very impossible person to live with peacefully. Mr. Bishop, the man she married, was as quick-tempered and passionate as she, and, morally, was infinitely beneath her. He was the original of the husband in the Wrongs of Woman, who is represented as an unprincipled sensualist, brute, and hypocrite. The worst of it was that, when not carried away by his temper, his address was good and his manners insinuating. As one of his friends said of him, he was "either a lion or a spaniel." Unfortunately, at home he was always the lion, a fact which those who knew him only as the spaniel could not well believe. The marriage of two such people, needless to say, was not happy. They mutually aggravated each other. Eliza, with her sensitive, unforgiving nature, could not make allowances. Mr. Bishop would