Frankenstein Chapter 18 Summary: Delayed Promise. Journey to Create the Mate

Day after day after the return, he cannot collect the courage. He fears the disappointed fiend and still shrinks from the first step. Health comes back when he forgets the promise. Whole days in a little boat on the lake. Alphonse calls him aside: perhaps you regard Elizabeth as a sister; perhaps another woman has your honour. Victor says he loves her. An immediate union is horror and dismay. The deadly weight still hangs. He must finish the engagement and let the monster depart before any festival.

He asks for England, clothed as a change of scene. He cannot do the work in his father's house. A thousand accidents would tell the tale. Alphonse, glad to see any wish that is not melancholy, agrees: a few months, at most a year; the wedding on his return. Without asking, Alphonse and Elizabeth arrange that Clerval will join him at Strasburgh. Solitude is lost; a friend might also stand between him and the foe. Late September he orders the chemical instruments packed. Elizabeth's farewell is tearful and silent.

At Strasburgh the contrast is a wound. Henry is alive to every sunset. This is what it is to live. Victor sees neither evening star nor golden sunrise on the Rhine. They descend by boat through Mannheim and Mainz, vintage songs, ruined castles. Even Victor, lying at the bottom of the boat, drinks a little tranquillity. Then a gush of sorrow in the telling: where does Henry exist now. Holland, Rotterdam, a December morning, white cliffs, Tilbury, Greenwich. London: St. Paul's, the Tower, and the work still not begun.