Newton was just the man to please Shelley. He had endless theories which he put into practice. One of his favourite ideas was that when Man migrated from the equatorial regions and pushed northwards, he adopted unnatural habits and that from these sprang all his woes. One of such bad habits was the wearing of clothes: Newton’s children ran about the house entirely naked. Another bad habit was the eating of flesh food; the whole Newton family was vegetarian. Nothing could arouse more surely Shelley’s enthusiasm, and Mr. Newton supplied him with new arguments. “Man has no similarity with any carnivorous animal; he is without claws to hold his prey; the formation of his teeth points out that his food should be vegetables and fruit. He first knew sickness after taking to flesh-eating which, for him, is poison. Here you have the meaning of the story of Prometheus which is evidently a vegetarian myth. Prometheus, that is to say Man, discovered fire and invented cooking; immediately a vulture began to gnaw at his liver. The vulture is hepatitis, that’s quite clear.” Since the Newtons had taken to vegetarianism they had never needed any doctors nor any drugs. The children were the healthiest in the world, and Shelley, who had many opportunities of seeing the little girls, found them beautiful as sculptor’s models. He became a constant visitor, and the moment his voice was heard in the hall the five children rushed downstairs to meet him, and take him up with them to the nursery. Mrs. Newton and her sister Madame de Boinville were just as infatuated with him as were the children. At Godwin’s Fanny and Jane passed whole evenings in listening to him with ecstasy. They raved of his beauty, and his arguments appeared to them unassailable. Even in a family of republicans this young aristocrat, heir to an immense fortune and so disdainful of money, shone with a romantic light. As for him, between the two young girls, Fanny, gentle and reserved, Jane, hot-blooded and vehement, he seemed to be back again in those happy days of youthful fervour and high enthusiasm, when a bevy of adoring sisters and cousins clipt him round. Harriet pleased the Godwin girls less. They noticed that she never thought for herself but simply repeated her husband’s favourite phrases and that her grammar was faulty. “Poor dear Shelley!” said they, as soon as the couple had left them. “He certainly has not got the wife he ought to have.” This is an impression very general amongst young women who see the man they would have liked themselves in the possession of another. They even ventured to attack Harriet, in her absence, with tiny pin-pricks; they guessed intuitively those criticisms to which her doctrinaire husband would be most sensitive. “Harriet frightens me,” wrote Fanny, “she is such a fine lady.” Shelley was indignant.