Whilst the Genevese coteries were saying evil things of Shelley and Byron, _each_ of the poets knew the worst of the many bad things said about them in those cliques. Whether Mary and Claire participated fully in this knowledge is uncertain. Byron and Shelley may have withheld from the sisters some of the things said of them in Genevese society. From some motive of delicacy or considerateness, the two young men may have kept from the girls all they knew of what was tattled to their shame in the _salons_ of the city; though one does not see clearly why they should have been so uncommunicative to the eighteen-years-old girls, whom Shelley had carried through _The Empire of the Nairs_, and had introduced to all the reasons for agreeing with the anti-matrimonial note to _Queen Mab_. Enthusiasts in the new social philosophy, the sisters were prepared for the misrepresentation and calumny, ever poured upon social reformers by the slaves of prejudice and ignorance. It is, however, no question that the story, which Byron a few years later (March, 1820) charged Southey with circulating (and possibly inventing) in order ‘to blast the character of the daughter’ of the woman he had formerly loved, was a story well known to the author of _Childe Harold_ in August, 1816. If, on returning to England from his Swiss trip, Southey reported (as Byron averred in March, 1820) that Byron and Shelley were living in promiscuous intercourse with Mary and Claire, the author of _Thalaba_ only repeated a story, generally told and believed in Geneva, alike by tourists and residents, whilst he was living at the Villa Diodati.