to
these two hard-working women, she helped the latter with her sewing and
so contributed her share to the family means. It was not a congenial
occupation. But to her any work was preferable to waiting, Micawber-like,
for something better to turn up. Though she was happy because she was
with her friend, her life here was wellnigh as tragic as it had been in
her father's house. The family sorrows were great and many. Mr. Blood was
a ne'er-do-weel and a drunkard. Caroline, one of the daughters, had then
probably begun her rapid descent down-hill, moved thereto, poor girl, by
the relief which vice alone gave to the poverty and gloom of her home.
George, the brother, with whom Mary afterwards corresponded for so many
years, was unhappy because of his unrequited love for Everina
Wollstonecraft. He was an honest, good-principled young man, but his
associates were disreputable, and he was at times compromised by their
actions. But still sadder for Mary was the fact that Fanny, in addition
to domestic grievances, was tortured by the unkindness of an uncertain
lover. She had met, not long before, Mr. Hugh Skeys, a young but already
successful merchant. Attracted by her, he had been sufficiently attentive
and devoted to warrant her conclusion that his intentions were serious.
He seems to have loved her as deeply as he was capable of loving, but
discouraged perhaps by the wretched circumstances of the family, he could
not make up his mind to marry her. At one moment he was ready to desert
her, and at the next to claim her as his wife. Instead of resenting his
unpardonable conduct, as a prouder woman would have done, she bore it
with the humble patience of a Griselda. When he was kind, she hoped for
the best; when he was cold, she dreaded the worst. The consequence of
these alternate states of hope and despair was mental depression, and
finally physical ill health. Through her troubles, Mary, who had given
her the warmest and best, because the first, love of her life, was her
faithful ally and comforter. Indeed, her friendship grew warmer with
Fanny's increasing misfortunes. As she said of herself a few years later,
she was not a fair-weather friend. "I think," she wrote once in a letter
to George Blood, "I love most people best when they are in adversity, for
pity is one of my prevailing passions." She realized that she had made
herself her friend's equal, if not superior, intellectually, and that, so
far as moral courage and will p