“Harriet a ‘fine lady’? And it is you who accuse her of this crime, in my eyes, the most unforgivable of any. The ease and simplicity of her manners have always been her greatest charm, and are incompatible with the vulgar brilliancy of fashionable life. You will not convert me to your opinion, so long as I have before my eyes the living witness of its falsity.”
Later on, this letter of Fanny’s came back to Shelley’s mind.
Hogg, now fully reconciled with his family, returned to London after a year’s exile at York to finish his law studies.
One evening as he sat reading in a comfortable arm-chair wrapped in a warm dressing-gown, a pot of hot tea by his side, he heard a tremendous knocking at the outer door of the house. Then this door was flung violently back against the wall, so that the whole building shook; Hogg recalled a pair of luminous eyes, a tall and stooping figure. . . .
“If Shelley were still friends with me, I should imagine . . .”
Some one rushing upstairs recalled rapid footsteps heard long ago on an Oxford staircase.
“No one but Shelley ever ran upstairs like that!”
The room-door opened, and there Shelley stood, hatless, with shirt-collar wide open, wild-looking, intellectual, always the image of some heavenly spirit come down to earth by mistake.
“I got your address from your ‘special pleader’ fellow, and not without trouble! He took me for a swindler of some kind and didn’t want to give it to me. What has become of you all this last year? . . . I’ve just got back from Ireland. . . . I went to preach humanity to the Irish Catholics. . . . Then we returned to Wales, a lovely country. . . . Harriet’s all right . . . she expects a child. . . . Have you read Berkeley? . . . At this moment I’m reading Helvetius . . . very clever, but dry stuff. . . .”
Hogg looked at him with the admiration, affection, and irony, of former days. Who but Shelley would start off to discuss Helvetius with a friend from whom he had parted on such bad terms a year back?
Shelley, full of animation and joy, walked about the room, opened books, put questions to which he never waited the answers, and seemed to have forgotten completely that Hogg had ever offended him.
He talked far into the night, and the men in the chambers next to Hogg knocked furiously on the walls to warn him that the high and piercing voice of his visitor prevented them from sleeping.