a well-meaning little thing.
She tried for a time to meet her husband's moods and to be a real
companion to him. But what could one expect from such a union? Shelley's
father withdrew the income which he had previously given. Jew Westbrook
refused to contribute anything, hoping, probably, that this course would
bring the Shelleys to the rescue. But as it was, the young pair drifted
about from place to place, getting very precarious supplies, running
deeper into debt each day, and finding less and less to admire in each
other.

Shelley took to laudanum. Harriet dropped her abstruse studies, which
she had taken up to please her husband, but which could only puzzle her
small brain. She soon developed some of the unpleasant traits of the
class to which she belonged. In this her sister Eliza--a hard and
grasping middle-aged woman--had her share. She set Harriet against her
husband, and made life less endurable for both. She was so much older
than the pair that she came in and ruled their household like a typical
stepmother.

A child was born, and Shelley very generously went through a second
form of marriage, so as to comply with the English law; but by this
time there was little hope of righting things again. Shelley was much
offended because Harriet would not nurse the child. He believed her hard
because she saw without emotion an operation performed upon the infant.

Finally, when Shelley at last came into a considerable sum of money,
Harriet and Eliza made no pretense of caring for anything except the
spending of it in "bonnet-shops" and on carriages and display. In
time--that is to say, in three years after their marriage--Harriet
left her husband and went to London and to Bath, prompted by her elder
sister.

This proved to be the end of an unfortunate marriage. Word was brought
to Shelley that his wife was no longer faithful to him. He, on his
side, had carried on a semi-sentimental platonic correspondence with a
schoolmistress, one Miss Hitchener. But until now his life had been
one great mistake--a life of restlessness, of unsatisfied longing, of a
desire that had no name. Then came the perhaps inevitable meeting with
the one whom he should have met before.

Shelley had taken a great interest in William Godwin, the writer and
radical philosopher. Godwin's household was a strange one. There was
Fanny Imlay, a child born out of wedlock, the offspring of Gilbert
Imlay, an American merchant, and of Mary Wollstonecr