This is an impression very general amongst young women who see the man they would have liked themselves in the possession of another. They even ventured to attack Harriet, in her absence, with tiny pin-pricks; they guessed intuitively those criticisms to which her doctrinaire husband would be most sensitive.
“Harriet frightens me,” wrote Fanny, “she is such a fine lady.” Shelley was indignant.
“Harriet a ‘fine lady’? And it is you who accuse her of this crime, in my eyes, the most unforgivable of any. The ease and simplicity of her manners have always been her greatest charm, and are incompatible with the vulgar brilliancy of fashionable life. You will not convert me to your opinion, so long as I have before my eyes the living witness of its falsity.”
Later on, this letter of Fanny’s came back to Shelley’s mind.
CHAPTER XV
MISS HITCHENER
Hogg, now fully reconciled with his family, returned to London after a year’s exile at York to finish his law studies.
One evening as he sat reading in a comfortable arm-chair wrapped in a warm dressing-gown, a pot of hot tea by his side, he heard a tremendous knocking at the outer door of the house. Then this door was flung violently back against the wall, so that the whole building shook; Hogg recalled a pair of luminous eyes, a tall and stooping figure. . . .
“If Shelley were still friends with me, I should imagine . . .”
Some one rushing upstairs recalled rapid footsteps heard long ago on an Oxford staircase.
“No one but Shelley ever ran upstairs like that!”