Page:In defense of Harriet Shelley, and other essays.djvu/36

 MARK TWAIN

He has deeply interested us. In the course of your intimacy he must have made you feel what we now feel for him. He is seeking a house close to us

Ah! he is not close enough yet, it seems

and if he succeeds we shall have an additional motive to induce you to come among us in the summer.

The reader would puzzle a long time and not guess the biographer s comment upon the above letter. It is this:

These sound like words of a considerate and judicious friend.

That is what he thinks. That is, it is what he thinks he thinks. No, that is not quite it : it is wjiat he thinks he can stupefy a .particularly and unspeak ably dull reader into thinking it is what he thinks. He makes that comment with the knowledge that Shelley is in love with this woman s daughter, and that it is because of the fascinations of these two that Shelley has deserted his wife for this month, considering all the circumstances, and his new pas sion, and his employment of the time, amounted to desertion; that is its rightful name. We cannot know how the wife regar ded it and felt about it; but if she could have read the letter which Shelley was writing to Hogg four or five days later, we could guess her thought and how she felt. Hear

him:



I have been staying with Mrs. Boinville for the last month; I have escaped, in the society of all that philosophy and friend ship combine, from the dismaying solitude of myself,

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