her who would buy the
prospective "hot stuff." Fortunately he succeeded.

After a few weeks, Mr. Godwin, bachelor, aged forty, found himself very
much in love with Mary Wollstonecraft and her baby. Her absolute purity of
purpose, her frankness, honesty and high ideals surpassed anything he had
ever dreamed of finding incarnated in woman. He became her sincere lover;
and she, the discarded, the forsaken, reciprocated; for it seems that the
tendrils of affection, ruthlessly uprooted, cling to the first object that
presents itself.

And so they were married; yes, these two who had so generously repudiated
the marriage-tie were married March Twenty-ninth, Seventeen Hundred
Ninety-seven, at Old Saint Pancras Church, for they had come to the sane
conclusion that to affront society was not wise.

On August Thirtieth, in the year Seventeen Hundred Ninety-seven, was born
to them a daughter. Then the mother died--died did brave Mary
Wollstonecraft, and left behind a girl baby one week old. And it was this
baby, grown to womanhood, who became Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley.

* * * * *

William Godwin wrote one great book: "Political Justice." It is a work so
high and noble in its outlook that only a Utopia could ever realize its
ideals. When men are everywhere willing to give to other men all the
rights they demand for themselves, and co-operation takes the place of
competition, then will Godwin's philosophy be not too great and good for
daily food. Among the many who read his book and thought they saw in it
the portent of a diviner day was one Percy Bysshe Shelley.

And so it came to pass that about the year Eighteen Hundred Thirteen, this
Percy Bysshe Shelley called on Godwin, who was living in a rusty, musty
tenement in Somerstown. The young man was twenty: tall and slender, with
as handsome a face as was ever given to mortal. The face was pale as
marble: the features almost feminine in their delicacy: thin lips,
straight nose, good teeth, abundant, curling hair, and eyes so dreamy and
sorrowful that women on the street would often turn and follow the "angel
soul garbed in human form."

This man Shelley was sick at heart, bereft, perplexed, in sore straits,
and to whom should he turn for advice in this time of undoing but to
Godwin, the philosopher! Besides, Godwin had been the husband of Mary
Wollstonecraft, and the splendid precepts of these two had nourished into
being all the latent excell