eel
Charles, temporarily prosperous or promising to be so, wrote her one that
pleased her, straightway she described the delight with which he would
make a friend of Imlay. When the latter had been away but a short time,
she found there was to be a new tie between them. As the father of her
unborn child he became doubly dear to her, while the consciousness that
another life depended upon her made her more careful of her health. "This
thought," she told him, "has not only produced an overflowing of
tenderness to you, but made me very attentive to calm my mind and take
exercise lest I should destroy an object in whom we are to have a mutual
interest, you know." As Kegan Paul says, "No one can read her letters
without seeing that she was a pure, high-minded, and refined woman, and
that she considered herself, in the eyes of God and man, his wife."

During the first part of his absence, Imlay appears to have been as
devoted as she could have wished him to be. When her letters to him did
not come regularly,--as indeed, how could they in those troubled
days?--he grew impatient. His impatience Mary greeted as a good sign. In
December she wrote:--

I am glad to find that other people can be unreasonable as well as
myself, for be it known to thee, that I answered thy _first_ letter
the very night it reached me (Sunday), though thou couldst not
receive it before Wednesday, because it was not sent off till the
next day. There is a full, true, and particular account.

Yet I am not angry with thee, my love, for I think that it is a
proof of stupidity, and, likewise, of a milk-and-water affection,
which comes to the same thing, when the temper is governed by a
square and compass. There is nothing picturesque in this
straight-lined equality, and the passions always give grace to the
actions.

Recollection now makes my heart bound to thee; but it is not to thy
money-getting face, though I cannot be seriously displeased with
the exertion which increases my esteem, or rather is what I should
have expected from thy character. No; I have thy honest countenance
before me,--Pop,--relaxed by tenderness; a little, little wounded
by my whims; and thy eyes glistening with sympathy. Thy lips then
feel softer than soft, and I rest my cheek on thine, forgetting all
the world. I have not left the hue of love out of the picture--the
rosy glow; and