“Mary, my only daughter, was absent in Scotland for her health, and returned to me on the 30th of March last. Shelley came to London on the 18th June and I invited him to take his meals at my house. On Sunday, June 26th, he accompanied Mary and her sister, Jane Clairmont, to the tomb of Mary’s mother, and there it seems the impious idea first occurred to him of seducing her. . . . He had the madness to disclose his plans to me and to ask my consent. I expostulated with him with all the energy of which I was master. . . . I seemed to have succeeded, but in the night of the 27th July, Mary and her sister Jane escaped from my house, and the next morning when I rose I found a letter on my dressing table informing me what they had done.” He begs Taylor to preserve the utmost secrecy about the affair, so that no stigma may be attached to the names of these unfortunate girls, and goes on: “When I use the word stigma I am sure it is wholly unnecessary to say that I apply it in a very different sense to the two girls. Jane has been guilty of an indiscretion only . . . Mary has been guilty of a crime.” Yet Shelley, in former days, had borrowed large sums to lend to Mary’s father, and on this account the bailiffs, so soon as they heard of his return, had begun to dun him. Godwin not only was unable to repay Shelley, but had fresh need of money himself, and it was these financial questions which compelled him, most reluctantly, to continue a correspondence with a depraved and perfidious young man. His conscience suffered greatly . . . or at least he said it did in every letter. So much hypocrisy in a man they had so venerated, was grievous to Mary and Shelley. “Oh, philosophy!” they said, and sighed. As to Mrs. Godwin, she reproached them above all with corrupting her daughter, and she forbade the gentle Fanny to visit them. She herself went to see Jane once, but meeting Shelley on the stairs she turned away her head. Their intercourse with Harriet was sometimes easy, sometimes difficult, according to her changes of mood. She wanted for nothing, having still some of Shelley’s money, besides receiving an allowance from the old tavern-keeper, but she was with child and very unhappy. She passed her days in telling her story to the gossips of the neighbourhood, or in writing in pathetic phrases to her friend Catherine Nugent, the Dublin dressmaker: