affection that he had felt for his cousin, his own disbelief in
marriage, and finally the common sense which ought to have told
him not to marry any one on two hundred pounds a year.

So the pair set off for Edinburgh by stagecoach. It was a weary
and most uncomfortable journey. When they reached the Scottish
capital, they were married by the Scottish law. Their money was
all gone; but their landlord, with a jovial sympathy for romance,
let them have a room, and treated them to a rather promiscuous
wedding-banquet, in which every one in the house participated.

Such is the story of Shelley's marriage, contracted at nineteen
with a girl of sixteen who most certainly lured him on against his
own better judgment and in the absence of any actual love.

The girl whom he had taken to himself was a well-meaning little
thing. She tried for a time to meet her husband's moods and to be
a real companion to him. But what could one expect from such a
union? Shelley's father withdrew the income which he had
previously given. Jew Westbrook refused to contribute anything,
hoping, probably, that this course would bring the Shelleys to the
rescue. But as it was, the young pair drifted about from place to
place, getting very precarious supplies, running deeper into debt
each day, and finding less and less to admire in each other.

Shelley took to laudanum. Harriet dropped her abstruse studies,
which she had taken up to please her husband, but which could only
puzzle her small brain. She soon developed some of the unpleasant
traits of the class to which she belonged. In this her sister
Eliza--a hard and grasping middle-aged woman--had her share. She