ulties, indeed, she set at naught,
compared with her despair of good, her confidence betrayed, and
when once she could conquer the misery that clung to her heart, she
struggled cheerfully to meet the poverty that was her inheritance,
and to do her duty by her darling child."

Godwin now began to see her frequently. She had established herself in
rooms in Gumming Street, Pentonville, where she was very near him. They
met often at the houses of Miss Hayes, Mr. Johnson, and other mutual
friends. Her interests and tastes were the same as his; and this fact he
recognized more fully as time went on. It is probably because his
thoughts were so much with her, that the work he accomplished during this
year was comparatively small. None of the other women he knew and admired
had made him act spontaneously and forget to reason out his conduct as
she did. He really had at one time thought of making Amelia Alderson his
wife, but this, for some unrecorded reason, proving an impossibility, he
calmly dismissed the suggestion from his mind and continued the friend he
had been before. Had Mrs. Reveley been single he might have allowed
himself to love her, as he did later, when he was a widower and she a
widow. But so long as her husband was alive, and he knew he had no right
to do so, he, with perfect equanimity, regulated his affection to suit
the circumstances. But he never reasoned either for or against his love
for Mary Wollstonecraft. It sprang from his heart, and it had grown into
a strong passion before he had paused to deliberate as to its
advisability.

As for Mary, Godwin's friendship coming just when it did was an
inestimable service. Never in all her life had she needed sympathy as she
did then. She was virtually alone. Her friends were kind, but their
kindness could not quite take the place of the individual love she
craved. Imlay had given it to her for a while, and her short-lived
happiness with him made her present loneliness seem more unendurable. Her
separation from him really dated back to the time when she left Havre.
Her affection for him had been destroyed sooner than she thought because
she had struggled bravely to retain it for the sake of her child. The
gayety and many distractions of London life could not drown her heart's
wretchedness. It was through Godwin that she became reconciled to
England, to life, and to herself. He revived her enthusiasm and renewed
her interest in the world and man