Elizabeth's faith that a retreat from the world would allow the two of them a relief
from the buffeting of experience is understandable, if sadly ill-placed. The ensuing
chapters seem deliberately designed to test this hope both in their exemplary tale
of a collective retreat (involving not just the DeLacey's and Safie, but the Creature
as well) and in the very fact that, themselves taking place in an almost inaccessible
retreat, they present Victor Frankenstein with a moral crisis of a kind he has never
known and is unprepared for.