Strong Poison part II

Peter visits Harriet to discuss her case and tells her that he has fallen in love with her.She is at first not very happy about this, since she has found that her notoriety has brought her several proposals from lunatic letter writers. She is emotionally bruised by her experiences. However she accepts that he has fallen in love with her.. Harriet is not really a very unconventional woman; she hoped for marriage but when he told her that he didn’t believe in marriage, she accepted his proposal of living together. She is not entirely happy with the situation. She refuses to meet his family so as not to embarrass them. However in their circle of writers and artists love affairs and living together weren’t uncommon and were acceptable. We learn during the trial that Harriet broke with Philip.. And her reason for doing so was that he had - after a year -offered to marry her legally. She was angry, because she felt that he had been lying to her, testing her devotion by getting her to go against her own wishes and live with him. She left him and he kept pursuing her, not understanding that his behaviour had killed her affection for him. She refuses to consider his proposals. Philip visits her to again discuss the issue.. And soon after this, he becomes very ill with gastritis and dies. He had very severe pains and the nurse talked about the case. Then the death was investigated as suspicious and it was proved that he was poisoned by arsenic. Because of the quarrels between them, and because Harriet had been researching a book on arsenic poisoning, she was arrested. During the trial, the judge seems hostile to Harriet, probably because of her having lived with Philip. Peter however is a worldly man who has had several relationships himself and comes from the aristocratic world, so he is tolerant of Harriet’s past affair.