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TRELAWNY'S LETTERS 121<br />

though he could not or would not give her<br />

what most she wanted material security.<br />

He never lost his taste for Claire ; and on<br />

the ruins of their bitter and agitated relations<br />

was built a kind of friendship, in which expansion<br />

and intimacy and malice were all<br />

possible, and which is aptly commemorated<br />

by these vivid and entertaining letters. As<br />

for Mary, her character deteriorated and<br />

Trelawny's judgment grew more acute. Her<br />

corners grew more brutally protuberant<br />

beneath the tissue of glamour cast over them<br />

by a name. To her also Trelawny's purse<br />

was open ; but long before the quarrel over<br />

" Queen Mab " his generous spirit had begun<br />

to groan under her prim banality, and to express<br />

itself in ungenerous backbitings. His<br />

final estimate he imparted to Claire when he<br />

was seventy-eight years old, and it remains<br />

for those who dislike to disprove it :<br />

" Mary Shelley's jealousy must have sorely<br />

vexed Shelley indeed she was not a suitable<br />

companion for the poet his first wife Harriett<br />

must have been more suitable Mary was the<br />

most conventional slave I ever met she even<br />

affected the pious dodge, such was her yearning<br />

for society she was devoid of imagination and<br />

Poetry she felt compunction when she had lost<br />

him she did not understand or appreciate him,"

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