The affair might have spent itself in a passing flirtation had not chance, in the form of a drunken driver who overturned a coach and dislocated the poet’s knee, confined him to his room for several weeks. His note explaining and deploring his inability to attend the tea-party was answered by one offering sympathy and regret. Burns and Mrs. M’Lehose both wielded free-flowing pens; their correspondence rapidly gained momentum and fervour. By the third exchange of letters she felt it her duty to remind him that she was a married woman. The result may or may not have been what she intended. Assuring her that his intentions were strictly honourable Burns seized the opportunity to express far more ardent chivalry and devotion than he would probably have ventured on had she been free. In reply she suggested their writing under Arcadian pseudonyms--no doubt as evidence of the strictly Platonic nature of their sentiments; displayed her acquaintance with _The Spectator_ by calling herself Clarinda; and suggested Sylvander for Burns. Having thus safely wrapped their correspondence in asbestos they relaxed in a vapour-bath of emotion. Less than three weeks after Burns’s accident he was assuring Clarinda that she was a gloriously amiable fine woman and was promising life-long devotion. But he was not admitting her as yet into his inner doubts and perplexities. Margaret Chalmers was the only woman who shared those. In fact both Sylvander and Clarinda seemed to have reserved their more intimate communications for personal speech. Apparently not until their long-deferred second meeting in January did Burns tell her about Jean and his children and Clarinda give him the whole tale of her unhappy marriage. She also sought in both speech and writing to convert him to Mr. Kemp’s particular brand of Calvinism. But here even at the height of his infatuation she failed. The most she got was a partial recantation of his liking for the heroic qualities of Milton’s Satan. So long as communication was limited to pen and ink the affair for Burns was little more than a literary exercise. After they began to meet it became different and, in its effects on him, worse. Physical nearness could not fail to stir a man of his temperament. Soon their conversation was supplemented by caresses which Clarinda, however, managed to keep within bounds. As a result, Burns left these interviews with his blood at fever heat. A servant-girl named Jenny Clow, successor to the Meg Cameron of the previous winter, provided the consummation which Clarinda denied, and in due course added yet another to his growing list of paternal, legal, and emotional perplexities.