ed capital. The man was a nomad by
nature--generous, extravagant and kind--but he lacked the patience and
application required to succeed as a businessman. He could not wait--he
wanted quick returns.

The wife had insight and intellect, and could follow a reason to its
lair. Imlay skimmed the surface.

Leaving his wife and babe at Havre, he went across to London. Mary once
made a trip to Norway for him, with the power of attorney, to act as she
thought best in his interests. In Norway she found that much of the land
that Imlay had bought was worthless, being already stripped of its
timber. However, she improved the time by writing letters for London
papers, and these eventually found form in her book entitled, "Letters
From Norway."

Arriving at Havre she found that Imlay had dismantled their home, and
for a time she did not know his whereabouts. Later they met in London.

When the time of separation came, however, she was sufficiently
disillusioned to make the actual parting without pain. When Imlay saw
she would no longer consent to be his wife, he proposed to provide for
her, but she declined the offer, fearing it would give him some claim
upon her and upon their child. And so Gilbert Imlay sailed away to
America and out of the life of Mary Wollstonecraft. Exit Imlay.

[Illustration: MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT]

* * * * *

In London the position of Mary Wollstonecraft was most trying.

Penniless, deserted by Imlay, her husband, with a hungry babe at her
breast, she was looked at askance by most of her old acquaintances.
There were not wanting good folks who gathered their skirts about them,
sneezed as she passed, and said, "I told you so."

Her brother Charles--a degenerate, pettifogging barrister, with all his
father's faults and none of his grandfather's virtues--for whom Mary had
advanced money so that he could go to college, came to her in her dire
extremity and proffered help. But it was on condition that she should
give up her babe and allow him to place it in a foundlings' home. This
being done, the virtuous Charles would get Mary a position as weaver in
a woolen-mill, under an assumed name, and the past would be as if it
never had been. This in the face of the assertion of Pliny, who said,
eighteen hundred years before, that one of the things even God could not
do, was to obliterate the past; and of Omar's words, "Nor all your tears
shall blot a line of it."

The mental pro