The Clarinda episode has more prominence in most accounts of Burns than it deserves. In its beginning and growth it was in fact quite untypical of the man--his one intensive effort to act a part not natural to him. Its development in this way was mainly the result of the accident which threw him back on letter-writing instead of speech in conducting his suit. Agnes M’Lehose when Burns met her was a plump young matron about his own age. Born Agnes Craig of Glasgow and a relative of one of the Lords of Session, she had married in romantic haste at the age of seventeen a young lawyer named James M’Lehose, and when Burns met her had already had eleven years of leisure to repent. Her husband, after abusing and neglecting her and getting into debt and disgrace, had at last been exiled by indignant relatives to Jamaica--that tropical refuge for Britons who had made their native climate too hot for them. His wife, trying to rear three sickly children on a microscopic annuity, had turned for consolation to literature and religion. In the latter she had espoused under the dynamic preaching of the Rev. John Kemp the strictest tenets of Calvinism; in the former she had familiarized herself with the most elegant authors of the day and had taken to versifying occasionally with the fluency and inaccuracy prevalent among women poets prior to Christina Rossetti and Emily Brontë. Like most of Edinburgh in 1787 she had been eager to meet Burns. When at last she did so at a tea-party given by her friend, Miss Erskine Nimmo, she and Burns became so visibly absorbed in each other as to rouse the amusement of the other guests. The poet’s experiences hitherto with young women of the upper classes had been disappointing. They were polite and attentive, but reserved. Here at last was an indubitable lady, and a young and attractive one at that, who displayed something like the enthusiastic attention he had been accustomed to receive from the belles of Mauchline. Before the tea was over Burns had accepted Mrs. M’Lehose’s invitation to a party of her own. If ever a woman threw herself at a man’s head Agnes M’Lehose did, and Burns was not the man to refuse such a challenge. A letter to Richard Brown in the early days of his infatuation leaves no doubt that he thought he had made a conquest; but he had reckoned without Clarinda’s Calvinism and her social traditions.