Page:Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin (Pennell, 1885).djvu/205

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LIFE WITH GODWIN: MARRIAGE.
189

tions on paper. To read them is like listening to some one talking. They show how ready Mary was to enlist Godwin's sympathy on all occasions, small as well as great, and how equally ready he was to be interested. It is strange to hear these two apostles of reform talking much in the same strain as ordinary mortals, making engagements to dine on beef, groaning over petty ailments and miseries, and greeting each other in true bon compagnon style. Mary's notes, like her letters to Imlay, are essentially feminine. Short as they are, they are full of womanly tenderness and weakness. Sometimes she wrote to invite Godwin to dinner, or to notify to him that she intended calling at his apartments, at the same time sending a bulletin of her health and of her plans for the day.

There was now a decided improvement in the lives of both Mary and Godwin. The latter, under the new influence, was humanized. Domestic ties, which he had never known before, softened him. He hereafter appears not only as the passionless philosopher, but as the loving husband and the affectionate father, little Fanny Imlay being treated by him as if she had been his own child. His love transformed him from a mere student of men to a man like all others. He who had always been, so far as his emotional nature was concerned, apart from the rest of his kind, was, in the end, one with them. From being a sceptic on the subject, he was converted into a firm believer in human passion. With the zeal usually attributed to converts, he became as warm in his praise of the emotions as he had before been indifferent in his estimation of them.

Mary was as much metamorphosed by her new circumstances as Godwin. Her heart at rest, she grew