plate. The words she used were often the direct opposites of the words she meant to use" ("Life of Rousseau," p. 72).
But nearly imbecile as she was, she loved her children, and deeply resented the cruel wrong her husband did her in snatching them from her. “The fool Theresa," with almost nothing to commend her but the primitive maternal instinct, may seem to many of us a more touching and instructive spectacle than a score of philosophers maundering over the thesis that woman has been formed for the sole purpose of being pleasing to man and subject to his rule. Mary Wollstonecraft seems to have known of Theresa's mental limitations and nothing more, and this was enough to show her that what Rousseau looked for in a wife was not a companion who could share his aims and stimulate his thoughts and imagination by her sympathy, but just a creature who had the physical capacity of bearing children, and who was present without necessarily being spoken to—he sometimes passed weeks without addressing to her a single word—when complete solitude would have been distasteful to him.
There is a peculiar satisfaction on the part of those who are trying to produce a change in general feeling in regard to any subject, when one of their opponents will state boldly, in so many words, what is the real foundation of the sentiment which inspires them. The majority of their spokesmen feel that the real reason of their opposition is too little respectable for open avowal; they count upon its secret influence, but never refer to it in public, It is therefore with a
