Ours was not an idle happiness, a paradise of selfish and transitory
pleasures. It is perhaps scarcely necessary to mention, that, influenced
by the ideas I had long entertained upon the subject of cohabitation, I
engaged an apartment, about twenty doors from our house in the Polygon,
Somers Town, which I designed for the purpose of my study and literary
occupations. Trifles however will be interesting to some readers, when
they relate to the last period of the life of such a person as Mary. I
will add therefore, that we were both of us of opinion, that it was
possible for two persons to be too uniformly in each other's society.
Influenced by that opinion, it was my practice to repair to the
apartment I have mentioned as soon as I rose, and frequently not to make
my appearance in the Polygon, till the hour of dinner. We agreed in
condemning the notion, prevalent in many situations in life, that a man
and his wife cannot visit in mixed society, but in company with each
other; and we rather sought occasions of deviating from, than of
complying with, this rule. By these means, though, for the most part, we
spent the latter half of each day in one another's society, yet we were
in no danger of satiety. We seemed to combine, in a considerable degree,
the novelty and lively sensation of visit, with the more delicious and
heart-felt pleasures of domestic life.

Whatever may be thought, in other respects, of the plan we laid down to
ourselves, we probably derived a real advantage from it, as to the
constancy and uninterruptedness of our literary pursuits. Mary had a
variety of projects of this sort, for the exercise of her talents, and
the benefit of society; and, if she had lived, I believe the world would
have had very little reason to complain of any remission of her
industry. One of her projects, which has been already mentioned, was of
a series of Letters on the Management of Infants. Though she had been