Shelley called Holbach to the aid of Godwin. “If God is just, how can we believe that he will punish creatures whom he himself has created weak? If he is All-Powerful, how is it possible either to offend him or resist him? If he is reasonable, why is he angry with the hapless beings to whom he has left the liberty to be unreasonable?” “Custom . . .” “What can custom matter to us in this short moment of eternity which we call the nineteenth century?” Elizabeth took her brother’s side, and it was impossible for Harriet to oppose a demi-god with flashing eyes, a shirt-collar open on a delicate throat, and hair as fine as spun-silk. She sighed; then to change the conversation, “Let us go on with _Zastrozzi_?” she proposed. This was a novel which the three were writing together. It dealt with a robber chief, a haughty tyrant, and an “elegantly proportioned heroine all tenderness and purity.” The hours passed pleasantly in _Zastrozzi’s_ company; the evening closed in. Elizabeth left the guileless lovers alone in the darkness. Shelley and Harriet, their arms interlocked, wandered back to the house through the white mist rising from the meadows. The breeze waved the topmost leaves of the trees across the face of the moon. The anemones shut their pale cups and drooped their heads. The sadness of twilight reminded Shelley of his approaching return to the sombre cloisters of Eton. But conscious of the warm loveliness of his cousin, who trembled and vibrated beneath his touch, he felt himself filled with new courage for a life of apostleship and combat. CHAPTER III THE CONFIDANT In October, 1810, Timothy Shelley took his son up to Oxford. The member for New Shoreham was in the best of tempers. Objecting to hotels, he put up at his old lodgings in the High—“the leaden horse”—appropriate house-sign of John Slatter, Plumber and Glazier. This Slatter was a son of Mr. Shelley’s former landlord, whom he had succeeded in the lodging-house and plumbing businesses. Another son, with whom to his chagrin he was to have much to do, had gone into partnership with Munday, bookseller at Carfax. Mr. Shelley had come to enter a future baronet in the books of University College; through which he himself had passed many years earlier, without distinction. Such ceremonies are always agreeable to an Englishman, and would be particularly so to a man of the consequential turn of mind of Timothy Shelley. So soon as the rite was satisfactorily accomplished, he went down with Bysshe to the bookseller, and there opened for him an unlimited credit in books and paper. “My son here,” he said, pointing good-humouredly to the wild-haired youth with luminous eyes who stood by, “has a literary turn, Mr. Slatter. He is already the author of a romance”—it was the famous _Zastrozzi_—“and if he wishes to publish again, do pray indulge him in his printing freaks.”