When he saw her again her face was pale, wasted, tragic.
“They have made you suffer?”
“No, no. . . .” She hesitated to say, “I suffer because I am in love with you,” but her eyes, lifted to his, confessed the truth. She was madly in love with him. He had completely transformed her. Before meeting him she had had all the normal tastes of the British schoolgirl. She had adored the red coats of the military, and when she wove day-dreams the hero was always an officer. But when she dreamed of marriage the hero became a black-coated clergyman.
Shelley had overthrown all such reasonable ideals. The first time she had heard him declaim on religion or politics, she had been frightened, and made up her mind to convert him. But at the outset his logic had crushed her, and conquered by an antagonist so greatly her superior, she found nothing but pleasure in her defeat.
When he had decided not to join them in Wales, she was afraid she had lost him, and in writing to him had exaggerated her hardships in order to bring her hero back.
Shelley had little admiration for Knight Errantry, which struck him as senseless. A man has no right to devote to Woman a life which should be consecrated to the service of Humanity. But looking on Harriet’s exquisite face, which a single word from him could suffuse with happiness, he gave his principles the go-by. He took her hand in his, and declared himself hers heart and soul.
A last rag of prudence made him decide against an immediate elopement. It was dangerous and needless to force events. If they tried to coerce her, she had but to make a sign to him, he would fly to her from the ends of the earth and carry her off.
Once more her face glowed with the rosy happiness of the young girl who knows she is beloved.
⁂
But the moment he had left her, he sighed deeply and fell into embarrassment and melancholy. He wrote to describe the situation to Hogg, and Hogg replied strongly urging his friend not to elope with Harriet without marrying her first. He knew all Shelley’s hostility to marriage, but he used powerful arguments. “If you don’t marry her, which will suffer? You or she? Evidently she alone. It is she whom the world will scorn. It is she who must make the sacrifice of her reputation and her security. Have you the right to ask this of her?” The appeal was cleverly turned, as selfishness was of all vices the one which Shelley most despised. But he felt too that marriage was a shameful and immoral action. The chapters in Political Justice against matrimonial chains stuck in his mind. It was now that some one reassured him by telling him that the great Godwin himself had been married twice.