is nothing; it was better than wooing her in her
nursery, at any rate, where it might have disturbed the other children.

However, she was a child in years only. From the day that she set her
masculine grip on Shelley he was to frisk no more. If she had occupied
the only kind and gentle Harriet's place in March it would have been a
thrilling spectacle to see her invade the Boinville rookery and read the
riot act. That holiday of Shelley's would have been of short duration,
and Cornelia's hair would have been as gray as her mother's when the
services were over.

Hogg went to the Godwin residence in Skinner Street with Shelley on that
8th of June. They passed through Godwin's little debt-factory of a book-
shop and went up-stairs hunting for the proprietor. Nobody there.
Shelley strode about the room impatiently, making its crazy floor quake
under him. Then a door "was partially and softly opened. A thrilling
voice called 'Shelley!' A thrilling voice answered, 'Mary!' And he
darted out of the room like an arrow from the bow of the far-shooting
King. A very young female, fair and fair-haired, pale, indeed, and with
a piercing look, wearing a frock of tartan, an unusual dress in London at
that time, had called him out of the room."

This is Mary Godwin, as described by Hogg. The thrill of the voices
shows that the love of Shelley and Mary was already upward of a fortnight
old; therefore it had been born within the month of May--born while
Harriet was still trying to get her poem by heart, we think. I must not
be asked how I know so much about that thrill; it is my secret. The
biographer and I have private ways of finding out things when it is
necessary to find them out and the customary methods fail.

Shelley left London that day, and was gone ten days. The biographer
conjectures that he spent this interval with Harriet in Bath. It would
be just like him. To the end of his days he liked to be in love with two
women at once. He was more in love with Miss Hitchener when he married
Harriet than he was with Harriet, and told the lady so with simple and
unostentatious candor. He was more in love with Cornelia than he was
with Harriet in the end of 1813 and the beginning of 1814, yet he
supplied both of them with love poems of an equal temperature meantime;
he loved Mary and Harriet in June, and while getting ready to run off
with the one, it is conjectured that he put in his odd time trying to get
reconcile