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longing in vain for a sign of ‘moral beauty’, Mary felt her soul ‘sicken’. It was cold comfort to pride herself on the triumph of reason: ‘I am persuaded misfortunes are of the greatest service, as they set things in the light they ought to be view’d in.’ She would repeat this principle, out-staring her weaker self: ‘In the school of adversity we learn knowledge and control our inconsistent hearts.’ But her weaker self was not so easily subdued.
    It can only have been in Bath that she first met a handsome flirt, thirteen years older than herself. Joshua Waterhouse was the son of a yeoman farmer in Derbyshire, who had crossed class divides when he entered as a sizar * at St Catherine’s College, Cambridge, in 1770. He had been ordained as a priest and elected a Fellow of his college in 1774. It was not an age when Fellows took on many pupils or absorbed themselves in research, but idleness attained new heights in Waterhouse, who did the rounds of the watering-places in the company of a titled friend. Well-spoken and stylish, master of the smothered sigh and downcast look, he appealed to women. He amassed piles of love-letters–enough, he liked to boast, to cook awedding feast–though his fellowship forbade marriage. Mary’s letters to Waterhouse have vanished in a sackful of others, but she did once describe her efforts to reform him: ‘I knew a woman very early in life warmly attached to an agreeable man, yet she saw his faults; his principles were unfixed…She exerted her influence to improve him, but in vain did she for years try to do it.’ In the process, Mary learnt something about herself that was hard to accept: it was driven home that however much she prided herself on good sense, her biological nature was, and would always be, as much prey to passion as that of lighter women. In fact, she acknowledged ruefully, the chaste woman who took a man seriously was ‘most apt to have violent and constant passions, and to be preyed on by them’. She was honest enough to record what reason deplored: the ‘extreme pain’ of unexpressed desire. Next to guilt, she thought, the greatest misery was to love a person whom her reason could not respect.
    Played on and lonely, Mary held fast to old ties. It came to her ears that the Ardens were living in Bath, and she hurried to see them in St James’s Street. She found Jane’s father and sisters at home, not Jane herself who had been employed since 1775–before she was seventeen–as governess to the six daughters of Sir Mordaunt Martin of Burnham in Norfolk. To be a governess had not been Jane’s wish, yet she had found it in her to accommodate. However much she missed her Yorkshire home and sisters, she found, as did her father, sufficient happiness in the exercise of her intellect and the importance she gave to education. So began a teaching career that was to last sixty years. Jane Arden was a born teacher who endeared herself to her pupils in an affectionate and cultured family. Through them she met Captain Nelson–later, Admiral–who gave her a list of paintings she should know, including a Rubens of Mary bathing Christ’s feet with her tears, which the family took Jane to see at Houghton, the seat of the Earl of Orford. This sort of attention meant much to Jane with her longing, like Mary’s, for knowledge. Mary wrote to her in the spring of 1779 ‘by way of a prelude to a correspondence’. She looked to Jane for a counter to sentimental dreams: ‘I should be glad to hear that you had met with a sensible worthy man, tho’ they are hard to be found–.’
    It was to Jane that Mary confided the ‘blast of adversity’ resulting fromher father’s misconduct. Confessions of gloom (‘Pain and disappointment have constantly attended me since I left Beverley’) alternate with unconvincing efforts to act out the role of