next room, where he informed Claire that Mary was not in a state of
health to be suddenly alarmed. They talked all night, till the dawn,
showing Shelley in a very haggard aspect to Claire's excited
imagination (Shelley had been quite ill the previous day, as noted by
Mary). She excited herself into strong convulsions, and Mary had
finally to be called up to quiet her. The same effect tried a little
later fortunately fell flat; but there seemed no end to the vagaries
of Claire's "unsettled mind" as Shelley calls it, for she takes to
walking in her sleep and groaning horribly, Shelley watching for two
hours, finally having to take her to Mary. Certainly philosophy did
not seem to have a calming effect on Claire Claremont's nature, and
often must Shelley and Mary have bemoaned the fatal step of letting
her leave her home with them. It was more difficult to induce her to
return, if indeed it was possible for her to do so, with the remaining
sister, Fanny, still under Godwin's roof. Fanny's reputation was
jealously looked after by her aunts Everina and Eliza, who
contemplated her succeeding in a school they had embarked in in
Ireland. But it is not to be wondered at that the excitable, lively
Clara should have groaned and bemoaned her fate when transferred from
the exhilaration of travel and the beauties of the Rhine and
Switzerland to the monotony of London life in her anomalous position;
and although both Mary and Shelley evidently wished to be kind to her,
she felt more her own wants than their kindness. Want of occupation
and any settled purpose in life caused pillows and fire-boards to walk
in poor Claire's room, much as other uninteresting objects have to
assume a fictitious interest in the houses and lives of many
fashionably unoccupied ladies of the present day, who divide their
interest between a twanging voice or a damp hand and the last poem of
the last fashionable poet. Shelley is not the only imaginative and
simple-minded poet who could apparently believe in such a phenomenon