Unfortunately, Timothy Shelley, with characteristic wrong-headedness, chose a test of Bysshe’s obedience to which it was impossible for him to submit; he could not write to the authorities of University College that he was now a sincere and dutiful son of the Church. And, failing this, his father declined all further communication with him.
“I am not so degraded and miserable a slave,” wrote Shelley to the Duke of Norfolk, “as publicly to disavow an opinion which I believe to be true. Every man of common sense must plainly see that a sudden renunciation of sentiments seriously taken up is as unfortunate a test of intellectual uprightness as can possibly be devised. . . . I am willing to concede everything that is reasonable, anything that does not involve a compromise of that self-esteem without which life would be a burden and a disgrace.”
Eliza considered such obduracy absurd. “Thus Harriet, so soon to be brought to bed, will not even have a carriage to save her running about the streets on foot!” Shelley, exasperated, bought a carriage on credit, and refused to use it. He hated being shut up in a closed carriage, and much preferred long tramps with Hogg on foot.
Though sick to death of Eliza at home, there were plenty of pleasant houses where he could take refuge. There was the Godwins’ in Skinner Street, where Fanny and Jane Clairmont always received him with open arms. There was the Newtons’ in Chester Square, where he found affection, intelligence, and old-world courtesy. Mrs. Newton, a first-rate musician, the favourite pupil of Dussek, would sit down to the piano, while Shelley seated on the rug amidst the children would tell them tales of ghosts and phantoms in a low voice.
Very often Madame de Boinville was on a visit to her sister. These two ladies, daughters of a wealthy St. Vincent planter, had received a mixed Anglo-French education that Shelley, tremendous admirer of the French philosophers, much appreciated. Madame de Boinville, in particular, charmed him. Her romantic marriage with a ruined _émigré_, a friend of André Chénier and of La Fayette, invested her with a poetic fascination. She was a woman with white hair, but with so childlike a face, such speaking eyes, a mind so lively and up-to-date, that one had more pleasure in talking with her than with many a younger woman. For the first time in his life Shelley found, in her and her sister, women whose intellectuality was on a par with his own.