her poem by heart; and still he was not happy, and Mary pitied him, for she had had trouble herself.  But I am not satisfied with this.  It reads too much like statistics.  It lacks smoothness and grace, and is too earthy and business-like.  It has the sordid look of a trades-union procession out on strike.  That is not the right form for it.  The book does it better; we will fall back on the book and have a cake-walk: 

“It was easy to divine that some restless grief possessed him; Mary herself was not unlearned in the lore of pain.  His generous zeal in her father’s behalf, his spiritual sonship to Godwin, his reverence for her mother’s memory, were guarantees with Mary of his excellence.—­[What she was after was guarantees of his excellence.  That he stood ready to desert his wife and child was one of them, apparently.]—­The new friends could not lack subjects of discourse, and underneath their words about Mary’s mother, and ‘Political Justice,’ and ‘Rights of Woman,’ were two young hearts, each feeling towards the other, each perhaps unaware, trembling in the direction of the other.  The desire to assuage the suffering of one whose happiness has grown precious to us may become a hunger of the spirit as keen as any other, and this hunger now possessed Mary’s heart; when her eyes rested unseen on Shelley, it was with a look full of the ardor of a ‘soothing pity.’”

Yes, that is better and has more composure.  That is just the way it happened.  He told her about the wet-nurse, she told him about political justice; he told her about the deadly sister-in-law, she told him about her mother; he told her about the bonnet-shop, she murmured back about the rights of woman; then he assuaged her, then she assuaged him; then he assuaged her some more, next she assuaged him some more; then they both assuaged one another simultaneously; and so they went on by the hour assuaging and assuaging and assuaging, until at last what was the result?  They were in love.  It will happen so every time.

          “He had married a woman who, as he now persuaded himself, had
          never truly loved him, who loved only his fortune and his rank,
          and who proved her selfishness by deserting him in his misery.”

I think that that is not quite fair to Harriet.  We have no certainty that she knew Cornelia had turned him out of the house.  He went back to Cornelia, and Harriet may have supposed that he was as happy with her as ever.  Still, it was judicious to begin to lay on the whitewash, for Shelley is going to need many a coat of it now, and the sooner the reader becomes used to the intrusion of the brush the sooner he will get reconciled to it and stop fretting about it.

After Shelley’s (conjectured) visit to Harriet at Bath—­8th of June to 18th—­“it seems to have been arranged that Shelley should henceforth join the Skinner Street household each day at dinner.”