Yes, mischief had been wrought.  The biographer arrives at this conclusion, and it is a most just one.  Then, just as you begin to half hope he is going to discover the cause of it and launch hot bolts of wrath at the guilty manufacturers of it, you have to turn away disappointed.  You are disappointed, and you sigh.  This is what he says —­the italics [’’] are mine: 

          “However the mischief may have been wrought—­’and at this day
          no one can wish to heap blame an any buried head’—­”

So it is poor Harriet, after all.  Stern justice must take its course—­ justice tempered with delicacy, justice tempered with compassion, justice that pities a forlorn dead girl and refuses to strike her.  Except in the back.  Will not be ignoble and say the harsh thing, but only insinuate it.  Stern justice knows about the carriage and the wet-nurse and the bonnet-shop and the other dark things that caused this sad mischief, and may not, must not blink them; so it delivers judgment where judgment belongs, but softens the blow by not seeming to deliver judgment at all.  To resume—­the italics are mine: 

“However the mischief may have been wrought—­and at this day no one can wish to heap blame on any buried head—­’it is certain that some cause or causes of deep division between Shelley and his wife were in operation during the early part of the year 1814’.”

This shows penetration.  No deduction could be more accurate than this.  There were indeed some causes of deep division.  But next comes another disappointing sentence: 

          “To guess at the precise nature of these cafes, in the absence
          of definite statement, were useless.”

Why, he has already been guessing at them for several pages, and we have been trying to outguess him, and now all of a sudden he is tired of it and won’t play any more.  It is not quite fair to us.  However, he will get over this by-and-by, when Shelley commits his next indiscretion and has to be guessed out of it at Harriet’s expense.

“We may rest content with Shelley’s own words”—­in a Chancery paper drawn up by him three years later.  They were these:  “Delicacy forbids me to say more than that we were disunited by incurable dissensions.”

As for me, I do not quite see why we should rest content with anything of the sort.  It is not a very definite statement.  It does not necessarily mean anything more than that he did not wish to go into the tedious details of those family quarrels.  Delicacy could quite properly excuse him from saying, “I was in love with Cornelia all that time; my wife kept crying and worrying about it and upbraiding me and begging me to cut myself free from a connection which was wronging her and disgracing us both; and I being stung by these reproaches retorted with fierce and bitter speeches—­for it is my nature to do that when I am stirred, especially if the target of them is a person whom I had greatly loved and respected before, as witness my various attitudes towards Miss Hitchener, the Gisbornes, Harriet’s sister, and others—­and finally I did not improve this state of things when I deserted my wife and spent a whole month with the woman who had infatuated me.”