But the Rector of Harrow and the church-wardens considered it immoral to admit into their church the body of an illegitimate child, more particularly if the epitaph disclosed the name of the father. Allegra was therefore buried outside the church, and with no inscription, which was of course the proper thing to do. Lord Byron, who had never set foot inside the convent of Bagna-Cavallo while Allegra was alive, went to visit it some time after the child’s death, for now his regrets lent it a romantic and sentimental interest, inspired him with a fine meditation on death and on himself: “I shall go to her, but she shall not return to me.” The second Samuel was quite right. CHAPTER XXXV THE REFUGE Shelley was charmed with Casa Magni. He liked the wild solitude of the place, the forest behind the house, the rocky and wooded bays and the fisherman’s poor villages. But Mary felt lost and unhappy. Again pregnant, anxious, irritable, she would have much preferred to live in a city near a good doctor. She thought the peasantry uncouth and hateful, their _Genovese_ jargon disgusted her as much as the dialect of Tuscany had pleased her. The presence of Jane Williams, so appreciated by her at Pisa, began to get on her nerves. Housekeeping in common is for women the acid test. There were stupid quarrels over servants and frying pans. Shelley spoke too warmly of Jane’s perfection, and wrote her too divine serenades. To all Mary’s grumblings he replied with his usual sweetness. With the utmost tenderness he caressed and consoled her. “Poor Mary,” he said of her, “it is the curse of Tantalus to be endowed with such fine qualities, and yet unable to excite the sympathy indispensable to their application to domestic life.” He knew he could not change her, that her physical condition explained a good deal of her peevishness, which he bore with patient affection. What she constantly reproached him with was his complete indifference to the things that other men thought worth while. She still admired him as much as ever, in him alone she found the strength on which to lean. But why could he never use this strength to his own advantage? He seemed to have no notion of his own interests. His personality was not in his own eyes what theirs is for men in general, something strictly limited by definite boundaries; no, his poured outwards in a sort of luminous fringe melting into that of his friends, and even into that of perfect strangers. As to the customs and cares of human societies he continued to ignore them.