Both girls were hot-tempered, peevish, and resentful, as well as vehemently affectionate; Mary animated with the fervour and captiousness of her mother’s stock, whilst Claire was as impetuous and unruly as any girl of southern blood ripened by southern suns. Both girls were quick-witted, imaginative, and ambitious. Reared during their earlier childhood in Somers Town, discovered by Shelley in the rooms over the Skinner-Street shop, they were both fashioned to make a figure in the world; and even in the nursery, where Shelley may be said to have found them, they conceived the design of making themselves personages of celebrity. Slovens so long as they were poor, they developed a taste for dress and personal display as soon as they were rich enough to wear silk and velvet. Under favourable circumstances (never granted to either of them) Mary would have developed into a good and greatly useful woman; Claire into a generous and powerful, though possibly mischievous, woman. Under such circumstances, Mary would have been precisely conscientious and as truthful as sunshine (which she certainly was not in her later time), but Claire would all the same have been something of a schemer and an _intriguante_, and have valued propitious fortune chiefly on account of the greater power it afforded her for playing with men and women, as though they were mere cards and counters. Each of these girls, predestined to embittering disappointment by the malicious fate that for a brief hour stirred them both with a sense of dazzling success, numbered amongst their social endowments a degree of colloquial piquancy and conversational address that, in the absence of all her other natural excellencies, would have given her the advantage over ordinary women. Whilst Mary’s sparkling gossip sometimes smiled with humour (according to Thackeray a rare faculty in woman), Claire’s higher raillery smacked of the satire that, under the spur of anger, rolled in torrents of scornful irony from her writhing lips. The time was coming when Byron whitened and trembled under her scathing sarcasm. But Claire’s voice was made for better work than cruel speech. Music was her chief accomplishment; and whilst figuring creditably amongst professional performers as an instrumentalist, she only just missed the vocal excellence that would have enabled her to achieve her ambition to be an operatic singer. That she became so bright and vivid a force in Florentine drawing-rooms during Shelley’s later years, and after his death, was in no small degree owing to his admiration of her noble voice, and the care he took to provide her with good musical instruction whilst she lived with him and Mary at Marlow and in Italy.