eady had peculiar notions of her own was soon evident.
The same friend writes:--

"'What do you think of suicide?' said Harriet one day. 'Did you
ever think of destroying yourself?' It was a puzzling question, for
indeed the thought had never entered my head. 'What do you think of
matricide, of high treason, of rick-burning? Did you ever think of
killing any one? of murdering your mother? or setting rick-yards on
fire?' I replied."

But Harriet often discoursed at great length, in a calm, resolute
manner, of her purpose of killing herself some day or other. Of their
after-housekeeping in London lodgings Hogg writes:--

"Our dinners therefore were constructive, a dumb show, a mere empty
idle ceremony; our only resource against absolute starvation was
tea. Penny-buns were our assured resource. The survivors of those
days of peril and hardship are indebted for their existence to the
humane interposition and succor of penny-buns. A shilling's worth
of penny-buns for tea. If the purchase was intrusted to the maid,
she got such buns as none could believe to have been made on earth,
proving thereby incontestably that the girl had some direct
communication with the infernal regions, where they alone could
have been procured."

The married life was on the whole, when not a roaring farce, almost a
tragedy. Harriet's sister was, like the poor, always with them. Shelley
grew to hate her, and tried in every way to be delivered from her
presence, but in vain. Harriet would not live without her, and paid
little attention to anybody else when she was present. Two children were
born to them, but even the children Shelley was not permitted to enjoy
without the constant supervision of Eliza. He became nearly frantic from
the constant annoyance, and finally a separation came about between the
ill-mated pair. The women themselves became tired of the moping and
inefficient youth, who still remained poor and unsettled, with a father
desperately healthy and inexorable. They grew tired and went away,--the
wife, like Lady Byron, refusing to go back to such an aimless,
rhapsodizing husband. And in truth, the hardship of living with such a
man as Shelley, for a woman like Harriet, must have been very great. It
is easy to understand how a limited nature like hers should be worn out
by the exaction and impracticability of one like Shelley; for to her,
most impractica