ower were concerned, she was much the
stronger of the two. There is nothing which so deepens a man's or a
woman's tenderness, as the knowledge that the object of it looks up to
her or to him for support, and Mary's affection increased because of its
new inspiration.

It has been said that it was necessary for all Mr. Wollstonecraft's
daughters to leave his house. Mary was not yet in a position to help her
sisters, and they had but few friends. Their chances of self-support were
small. Their position was the trying one of gentlewomen who could not
make servants of themselves, and who indeed would not be employed as
such, and who had not had the training to fit them for higher
occupations. Everina, therefore, was glad to find an asylum with her
brother Edward, who was an attorney in London. She became his
housekeeper, for, like Mary, she was too independent to allow herself to
be supported by the charity of others. Eliza, the youngest sister, who,
with greater love of culture than Everina, had had even less education,
solved her present problem by marrying, but she escaped one difficulty
only to fall into another still greater and more serious. The history of
her married experience is important because of the part Mary played in
it. The latter's independent conduct in her sister's regard is a
foreshadowing of the course she pursued at a later period in the
management of her own affairs.

Eliza was the most excitable and nervous of the three sisters. The family
sensitiveness was developed in her to a painful degree. She was not only
quick to take offence, but was ever on the lookout for slights and
insults even from people she dearly loved. She assumed a defensive
attitude against the world and mankind, and therefore life went harder
with her than with more cheerfully constituted women. It was almost
invariably the little rift that made her life-music mute. Her indignation
and rage were not so easily appeased as aroused. Altogether, she was a
very impossible person to live with peacefully. Mr. Bishop, the man she
married, was as quick-tempered and passionate as she, and, morally, was
infinitely beneath her. He was the original of the husband in the "Wrongs
of Woman," who is represented as an unprincipled sensualist, brute, and
hypocrite. The worst of it was that, when not carried away by his temper,
his address was good and his manners insinuating. As one of his friends
said of him, he was "either a lion or a spaniel." Un