The moment she appeared in the sombre parlour, Shelley felt that he loved her, and love with him was no desire of the flesh, but a need for self-sacrifice to that which he adored. Ever at the back of his mind dwelt his ideal of perfect physical beauty united to perfect spiritual beauty, the myth of a lovely and persecuted woman whose knight he would become, some Andromeda to whom he would play Perseus, some Princess for whom he would be St. George; a myth which had always been the motive of his love adventures, which had led him to run away with Harriet to save her from her father, and to love Mary because she was unhappy. It was a sentiment made up in proportions unknown to himself, of desire and pity, which earthly perhaps in the beginning, had been so purified that it now merely raised to the highest point his creative power in poetry. In Mary he had long believed this mystic love had been found. She fell indeed as little short of a goddess as any woman may be. For the first time, perhaps, the real woman coincided with the Shelleyan image of her. Nevertheless, daily life with her had shown him traits quite incompatible with divinity. Mary, mother of a family and housekeeper, was a drier, a more practical Mary, than the loving and courageous young girl of Skinner Street. What Shelley had been used to praise as her diamond-like purity now seemed to him to partake of the coldness of ice, while her jealousy had become inconceivably petty. Worst of all, he now knew her too intimately to be able any longer to find in her a quickening of his ideas. In the beautiful and mysterious Emilia, on the contrary, he could incarnate his whole soul, because he knew nothing about her. At long last, he discovered in this Italian convent, the adorable and fleeting vision which he had pursued since boyhood, and which, every time that he had thought to seize it, had vanished away, leaving him in presence of a flesh-and-blood woman capable of wounding his sensitive soul. On coming into the parlour, Emilia addressed herself to a caged bird in terms which appeared to Shelley the most poetic in the world: “Poor little bird, you are dying of languor! How I pity you! How much you must suffer hearing the other birds calling to you, ere they depart for warmer climes! But you are doomed, like me, to finish in this prison your miserable life. . . . Ah, why can I not free you!” She was fond of improvising thus in Italian fashion all sorts of spoken poems that did not fail in quality—nor in quantity either. But Shelley saw in her true genius. He begged leave to come and call upon her again, and to bring with him his wife and his sister-in-law. She graciously gave her permission.