“I am sorry to say that your letter—this moment received—is written in a style the very opposite of conciliation, so that if I were to answer it in the same style we should be involved in a controversy of inextinguishable bitterness. As long as understanding and sentiment shall exist in this frame, I shall never cease from my disapprobation of that act of yours which I regard as the great calamity of my life.” _Shelley to Godwin._ “We will confine our communications to business. . . . “I plainly see how necessary immediate advances are to your concerns, and will take care that I shall fail in nothing which I can do to procure them.” The cold contempt of this letter did not discourage the borrower. CHAPTER XXII DON JUAN CONQUERED Mary’s child was born before its time, and the doctor said it would not live. Shelley kept watch between the cradle and the bed in company with Livy and Seneca. Fanny came round with baby-clothes sent by Mrs. Godwin in her capricious way, but the Philosopher remained inflexible. Hogg dropped in to gossip, to tell the great news of the day, the return from Elba, and he did Mary good by his common sense and sarcasm. With a temperature, and always in the society of Shelley, she had the rather terrifying if pleasant impression of slipping away out of life. Hogg brought her back to a sense of reality. In spite of predictions the child did live and grew. Mary began to feel easy about it, when at the end of the month she found on waking one morning that it was dead. This was a great sorrow. Shelley and Claire continued their walks together, while Mary stayed at home. She sat knitting and thinking of her little child. “I was a mother, and am so no longer,” she kept repeating, and at night she dreamed that the baby was not dead, and that by rubbing it before the fire they had brought it back to life. Then she awoke to find the cradle empty. From the streets floated up the hoarse shouting of crowds. It was a time of riots. France threatened war. Mary saw everything through a mist of tears. Claire’s presence in the house vexed her more and more. She was certain that Claire was in love with Shelley, had always been in love with him. Percy’s loyalty was self-evident, his morality super-human, angelic; but he thought it possible to read Petrarch with an impassioned girl, to direct her studies, to sit up with her the whole night through, without danger. Mary said to herself: “My charming Shelley understands the elves better than he does women.”