Shelley was now about nineteen years old—­an age at which most English boys are emerging from the public schools, and are still in the hobbledehoy stage of their formation.  In a way, he was quite far from boyish; yet in his knowledge of life he was little more than a mere child.  He knew nothing thoroughly—­much less the ways of men and women.  He had no visible means of existence except a small allowance from his father.  His four sisters, who were at a boarding-school on Clapham Common, used to save their pin-money and send it to their gifted brother so that he might not actually starve.  These sisters he used to call upon from time to time, and through them he made the acquaintance of a sixteen-year-old girl named Harriet Westbrook.

Harriet Westbrook was the daughter of a black-visaged keeper of a coffee-house in Mount Street, called “Jew Westbrook,” partly because of his complexion, and partly because of his ability to retain what he had made.  He was, indeed, fairly well off, and had sent his younger daughter, Harriet, to the school where Shelley’s sisters studied.

Harriet Westbrook seems to have been a most precocious person.  Any girl of sixteen is, of course, a great deal older and more mature than a youth of nineteen.  In the present instance Harriet might have been Shelley’s senior by five years.  There is no doubt that she fell in love with him; but, having done so, she by no means acted in the shy and timid way that would have been most natural to a very young girl in her first love-affair.  Having decided that she wanted him, she made up her mind to get Mm at any cost, and her audacity was equaled only by his simplicity.  She was rather attractive in appearance, with abundant hair, a plump figure, and a pink-and-white complexion.  This description makes of her a rather doll-like girl; but doll-like girls are just the sort to attract an inexperienced young man who has yet to learn that beauty and charm are quite distinct from prettiness, and infinitely superior to it.

In addition to her prettiness, Harriet Westbrook had a vivacious manner and talked quite pleasingly.  She was likewise not a bad listener; and she would listen by the hour to Shelley in his rhapsodies about chemistry, poetry, the failure of Christianity, the national debt, and human liberty, all of which he jumbled up without much knowledge, but in a lyric strain of impassioned eagerness which would probably have made the multiplication-table thrilling.

For Shelley himself was a creature of extraordinary fascination, both then and afterward.  There are no likenesses of him that do him justice, because they cannot convey that singular appeal which the man himself made to almost every one who met him.