success are hygienic. Mrs. Blood, an erstwhile friend,
saw Mary about this time, and wrote to an acquaintance: "I declare if
she isn't getting handsome and knows it. She has well turned thirty and
has a sprinkling of gray hair and a few wrinkles, but she is doing her
best to retrieve her youth."

Mary had now quit Blackfriars for better quarters near Hyde Park. Her
health was fully restored, and she moved in her own old circle of
writers and thinkers.

At this time William and Mary were both well out of the kindergarten. He
was forty and she was thirty-seven. Several years before, William had
issued a sort of proclamation to the public, and a warning to women of
the quest that bachelordom was his by choice, and that he was wedded to
philosophy. Very young people are given to this habit of declaration, "I
intend never to wed," and it seems that older heads are just as absurd
as young ones. It is well to refrain from mentioning what we intend to
do, or intend not to do, since we are all sailing under sealed orders
and nothing is so apt to occur as the unexpected.

Towards the last of the year Seventeen Hundred Ninety-six, William was
introducing Mary as his wife, and congratulations were in order. To
them, mutual love constituted marriage, and when love died, marriage was
at an end.

A sharp rebuke was printed about this time by Mary, evidently prompted
by that pestiferous class of law-breakers who do not recognize that the
opposites of things are alike, and that there is a difference between
those who rise above law and those who burst through it. Said Mary,
"Freedom without a sense of responsibility, is license, and license is
a ship at sea without rudder or sail." That the careless, mentally
slipshod, restless, and morally unsound should look upon her as one of
them caused Mary more pain than the criticisms of the unco guid. It was
this persistent pointing out by the crowd, as well as regard for the
unborn, that caused William and Mary to go quietly in the month of
March, Seventeen Hundred Ninety-seven, to Saint Pancras Church and be
married all according to the laws of England.

Godwin wrote of the mating thus: "The partiality we conceived for each
other was in that mode which I have always considered as the purest and
most refined quality of love. It grew with equal advances in the minds
of each. It would have been impossible for the most minute observer to
have said who was before and who was after. One sex did