No one contends that Harriet actually broke her marriage vow before the separation. What Professor Dowden asks us to believe is that _Shelley thought_ she was untrue to him at that period. Miss Clairmont’s evidence I reject as valueless. At the most she only reports something which Shelley is supposed to have said to Mary with the object of persuading her to elope with him, and which his subsequent conduct with regard to his son Charles Bysshe contradicted. The true inference to be drawn from Shelley’s and Godwin’s far more important letters in 1817 is that it was not until the latter date that the suspicion of Harriet’s guilt before the separation arose. This suspicion did not, however, harden into certainty, nor was it found capable of verification; else why did not Shelley use the fact, as he proposed, in order to strengthen his case against the Westbrooks? I admit that his letter to Southey in 1820 supports the view that, having once begun to entertain the suspicion, he never afterwards abandoned it.[42]
If now we turn to contemporary records between the dates, June, 1814, and May, 1815 (at which time Harriet disappears from our ken), we find no intimation either in Mary’s or Miss Clairmont’s diary, or in Shelley’s words and writings, or in the conduct of the Shelley-Godwin set, that Harriet was believed to have broken faith so early with her husband. When Shelley in the summer of 1814 sought to lower her in the eyes of Mary Godwin, he did so by hinting that she only cared for his money and his prospects.[43] Mary talks about her “insulting selfishness,” calls her “nasty woman,” and exhibits a good deal of resentment at Shelley’s welcome to his son and heir by her (December 6, 1814).[44] The pained reiteration of the words _wife_ in her diary on this occasion proves how bitterly she felt her own position as _mistress_. Shelley invited Harriet to establish herself in the neighbourhood of Mary and himself. She was visited in London by the whole party. But while they continued upon awkward terms of half familiarity and mutual irritation, nothing by word or act implied a knowledge of her previous infidelity. What is further to the point is that Mrs. Shelley, in her novel of _Lodore_, which Professor Dowden rightly judges to be a history of Shelley’s relation to Harriet, painted a wife’s gradual alienation from her husband without hinting at misconduct.[45]