Of the three young girls who had given life and gaiety to the house in Skinner Street, one only, Fanny Imlay, was left. She alone, who was neither Godwin’s child, nor yet Mrs. Godwin’s, lived at home with them and called them “papa” and “mamma.” She alone, so gentle and so loving, had found neither lover nor husband. Modest and unselfish, these are virtues which men praise—and pass by. For a moment she had wondered whether Percy would not think of her, and with a beating heart had begun a correspondence with him. But Mary’s hazel eyes had quenched the hopes to which the timid Fanny had never given definite form. In this silent home, saddened by money-worries, it was on Fanny that Mrs. Godwin wreaked her ill-humour, while Godwin let her understand that he could not continue to keep her, and that she ought to see about earning her own living. She asked nothing better, and would have liked to become a teacher, but the flight of Mary and Jane had thrown a mantle of disrepute over the household, and the heads of schools distrusted the way in which the Godwin girls had been brought up. Sick at heart and with a touch of envy, Fanny admired from afar her sisters’ life of wild adventure, a life which was sometimes dangerous, but always amusing. How she, too, would have loved to be over there at Lake Leman, in the company of the famous Lord Byron, of whom all London was talking! “Is his face as fine as in your portrait of him? . . . Tell me also if he has a pleasing voice, for that has a great charm with me. Does he come into your house in a careless, friendly, dropping-in manner? I wish to know, though not from idle curiosity, whether he was capable of acting in the manner that London scandal-mongers say he did. I cannot think from his writings that he can be such a _detestable being_. Do answer me these questions, for where I love the poet, I should like to respect the man. “Shelley’s boat excursion with him must have been very delightful. . . . I long very much to read the poems the ‘Poet’ has written on the spot where Julie was drowned. When will they be published in England? May I see them in manuscript? Say you have a friend who has few pleasures, and is very impatient to read them. . . . It is impossible to tell the good that POETS do their fellow creatures, at least those that can feel. Whilst I read I am a poet. I am inspired with good feelings—feelings that create perhaps a more permanent good in me than all the everyday preachments in the world; it counteracts the dross which one gives on the everyday concerns of life and tells us there is something yet in the world to aspire to—something by which succeeding ages may be made happy and perhaps better.”