The love had been pressed, as we have seen, and as Miss Clairmont, in her age, admitted, very particularly indeed. She had dreamt, she admits--and she would have us think that Shelley and Mary Godwin expected--that her alliance with "the great Lord Byron" was to be permanent; and this though she declares, elsewhere in her confessions, that she did not really love him, but was only dazzled by him, and that her heart, in truth, was Shelley's. It was an ambitious dream; and it would be easy to make a list of reasons why it was impossible that it should come true. The mood in which she found Byron was only one of them. The defects and limitations of her own qualities furnish others. She was a tradesman's daughter, and, though well-educated, not without vulgarity; pretentious, but superficial; stage-struck, a romp, and a mimic. If she ever mimicked Byron--if, in particular, she ever mimicked his lameness--a good deal would be explained. One does not know whether she did or not. What one does know is that he shook her off rather roughly, and, never having loved her, presently conceived a dislike for her; and that though she bore him a child--the little Allegra, so named after her birthplace, who only lived to be five years of age, and now lies buried at Harrow. To Allegra, indeed, Byron was good and kind--he looked forward, he told Moore and others, to the time when she would be a support to the loneliness of his old age; but to Allegra's mother he would have nothing more to say. How she hunted him down, and how she and the Countess Guiccioli made each other jealous--these are matters into which it is unnecessary to enter here. The conclusions which Miss Clairmont drew, as she told Mr. Graham, was that Byron's attitude towards women was that of a Sultan towards the ladies of his harem. No doubt it was so in her case--and through her fault; for her plight was very much like that of the worshipper of Juggernaut who should prostrate himself before the oncoming car and then complain because the wheels pass over him. Probably, if she had been less pressing, or less clinging, he would have been more grateful; for there assuredly was cause for gratitude even though there was no room for love. Vulgar, feather-headed, stage-struck little thing that she was, Jane Clairmont, by throwing herself at Byron's head, and telling him, without waiting to be asked, that she, at least, would count the world well lost for him--and still more perhaps by bringing him into relation with the Shelleys--had rendered him real help in the second desperate crisis of his life. One may repeat, indeed, that she helped him to live through that dark period; and if she knew that, or guessed it, she may well have felt aggrieved that his return for her passion was so inadequate.