The young wife was not invited, perhaps. If she was, she most certainly did not come, or she would have straightened the room up; the most ignorant of us knows that a wife would not endure a room in the condition in which Hogg found this one when he occupied it one night. Shelley was away—why, nobody can divine. Clothes were scattered about, there were books on every side: “Wherever a book could be laid was an open book turned down on its face to keep its place.” It seems plain that the wife was not invited. No, not that; I think she was invited, but said to herself that she could not bear to go there and see another young woman touching heads with her husband over an Italian book and making thrilling hand-contacts with him accidentally.
As remarked, he was a frequent visitor there, “where he found an easeful resting-place in the house of Mrs. Boinville—the white-haired Maimuna—and of her daughter, Mrs. Turner.” The aged Zonoras was deceased, but the white-haired Maimuna was still on deck, as we see. “Three charming ladies entertained the mocker (Hogg) with cups of tea, late hours, Wieland's Agathon, sighs and smiles, and the celestial manna of refined sentiment.”
“Such,” says Hogg, “were the delights of Shelley's paradise in Bracknell.”
The white-haired Maimuna presently writes to Hogg:
“I will not have you despise home-spun pleasures. Shelley is
making a trial of them with us—”
A trial of them. It may be called that. It was March 11, and he had been in the house a month. She continues:
Shelley “likes them so well that he is resolved to leave off
rambling—”
But he has already left it off. He has been there a month.
“And begin a course of them himself.”
But he has already begun it. He has been at it a month. He likes it so well that he has forgotten all about his wife, as a letter of his reveals.