With the Brown Demon on his right arm, and the Black Diamond, as he nicknamed Eliza Westbrook, on his left, he directed their steps towards St. James’s Park. “I could say, like Cornelia: ‘These are my jewels!’ ” he thought.
The two fair rivals attacked each other across him in phrases of haughty contempt. The languishing Eliza woke up to deal formidable blows with a calm soft acrimony. Miss Hitchener made a show of speaking only to Hogg. She discoursed on the Rights of Woman. Eliza who could not talk on this subject, nor on any other, found herself reduced to ignominious silence.
When they got home she penned Hogg into a corner of the hall.
“How could you talk to that nasty creature so much? How could you permit her to prate so long to you? Harriet will be seriously displeased with you, I assure you! She will be very angry.”
But Harriet merely smiled up at him and asked, “Were you not tired of the Brown Demon?”
When luncheon was over he wickedly led the conversation back to Woman’s Rights, and the Goddess of Reason was at once let loose. Shelley rose from his chair, came and stood before her and fell into animated discussion. The sisters Westbrook looked at him with sorrowful dismay as at one guilty of communication with the enemy.
Eliza whispered to Hogg, “If you only knew how dirty she is you wouldn’t go near her!”
But the moment of release came when the exile’s bags and boxes were piled into a hackney-coach, and the women of Shelley’s household were left dancing and singing for joy.
CHAPTER XVI
HARRIET
The few months which followed the departure of Miss Hitchener were happy months. The Shelleys were still penniless wanderers, but an immense interior satisfaction replaced for them money and home. He had begun a long poem, “Queen Mab,” and to work at it made life worth living. Harriet, who was with child, was sunk in an agreeable torpor, reserving all her strength for creative purposes, and so amused by and interested in her own sensations and hopes, as to be quite insensible to boredom.