Harriet Westbrook seems to have been a most precocious person. Any
girl of sixteen is, of course, a great deal older and more mature
than a youth of nineteen. In the present instance Harriet might
have been Shelley's senior by five years. There is no doubt that
she fell in love with him; but, having done so, she by no means
acted in the shy and timid way that would have been most natural
to a very young girl in her first love-affair. Having decided that
she wanted him, she made up her mind to get Mm at any cost, and
her audacity was equaled only by his simplicity. She was rather
attractive in appearance, with abundant hair, a plump figure, and
a pink-and-white complexion. This description makes of her a
rather doll-like girl; but doll-like girls are just the sort to
attract an inexperienced young man who has yet to learn that
beauty and charm are quite distinct from prettiness, and
infinitely superior to it.

In addition to her prettiness, Harriet Westbrook had a vivacious
manner and talked quite pleasingly. She was likewise not a bad
listener; and she would listen by the hour to Shelley in his
rhapsodies about chemistry, poetry, the failure of Christianity,
the national debt, and human liberty, all of which he jumbled up
without much knowledge, but in a lyric strain of impassioned
eagerness which would probably have made the multiplication-table
thrilling.

For Shelley himself was a creature of extraordinary fascination,
both then and afterward. There are no likenesses of him that do
him justice, because they cannot convey that singular appeal which
the man himself made to almost every one who met him.