Grief sometimes makes men strong. Mary's stimulated her into a determination to break her connection with Imlay, and to live for her child alone. She would remain in Paris and superintend Fanny's education. She had already been able to labour for herself, and there was no reason why she should not do it again. Until she settled upon the means of support to be adopted, she would borrow money from her friends. Anything was better than to live at Imlay's expense. As for him, such a course would probably be a relief, and certainly it would do him no harm. "As I never concealed the nature of my connection with you," she wrote to him, "your reputation will not suffer." But her plans, for some reason, did not meet with his approval. He was tired of her, and yet he seems to have been ashamed to confess his inconstancy. At one moment he wrote that he was coming to Paris; at the next he bade her meet him in London. But no mention was made of the farm in America. The excitement of commerce proved more alluring than the peace of country life. His shilly-shallying unnerved Mary; positive desertion would have been easier to bear.
The child was now the strongest bond of union between them. For her sake she felt the necessity of continuing to live with Imlay as long as possible, though his love was dead. Therefore, when he wrote definitely that he would like her to come to him, since he could not leave his business to go to her, she relinquished her intentions of remaining alone in France with Fanny, and set out at once for London. She could hardly have passed through Havre without feeling the bitter contrast between her happiness of the year before, and her present hopelessness. "I sit, lost in thought," she
