Page:In defense of Harriet Shelley, and other essays.djvu/65

 DEFENSE OF HARRIET SHELLEY

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 iSth &quot;it seems to have been arranged that Shelley should henceforth join the Skinner Street household each day at dinner.&quot;

Nothing could be handier than this; things will swim along now.

Although now Shelley was coming to believe that his wedded union with Harriet was a thing of the past, he had not ceased to regard her with affectionate consideration; he wrote to her frequently, and kept her informed of his whereabouts.

We must not get impatient over these curious inharmoniousnesses and irreconcilabilities in Shel ley s character. You can see by the biographer s attitude toward them that there is nothing objec tionable about them. Shelley was doing his best to make two adoring young creatures happy: he was regarding the one with affectionate consideration by mail, and he was assuaging the other one at home.

Unhappy Harriet, residing at Bath, had perhaps never desired that the breach between herself and her husband should be irreparable and complete.

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