“A scheme is at present in agitation for setting us up in a school of our own."...  “This day four years I wonder whether we shall be dragging on in our present condition or established to our hearts’ content.”

Then Emily dreams her dream.

“I guess that on the time appointed for the opening of this paper we, i.e. Charlotte, Anne, and I, shall be all merrily seated in our own sitting-room in some pleasant and flourishing seminary, having just gathered in for the midsummer holiday.  Our debts will be paid off and we shall have cash in hand to a considerable amount.  Papa, Aunt, and Branwell, will either have been or be coming to visit us.”

And Anne writes with equal innocence (it is delicious, Anne’s diary):  “Four years ago I was at school.  Since then I have been a governess at Blake Hall, left it, come to Thorp Green, and seen the sea and York Minster."...  “We have got Keeper, got a sweet little cat and lost it, and also got a hawk.  Got a wild goose which has flown away, and three tame ones, one of which has been killed.”

It is Emily who lets out the dreary secret of the dream—­the debts which could not be paid; probably Branwell’s.

But the “considerable amount of cash in hand” was to remain a dream.  Nothing came of Branwell’s knight-errantry.  He muddled the accounts of the Leeds and Manchester Railroad and was sent home.  It was not good for Branwell to be a clerk at a lonely wayside station.  His disaster, which they much exaggerated, was a shock to the three sisters.  They began to have misgivings, premonitions of Branwell’s destiny.

And from Mrs. White’s at Rawdon, Charlotte sends out cry after desolate cry.  Again we have an impression of an age of exile, but really the exile did not last long, not much longer than Emily’s imprisonment in the Academy for Young Ladies, nothing like so long as Anne’s miserable term.

The exile really began in ’forty-two, when Charlotte and Emily left England for Brussels and Madame Heger’s Pensionnat de Demoiselles in the Rue d’Isabelle.  It is supposed to have been the turning-point in Charlotte’s career.  She was then twenty-six, Emily twenty-four.

It is absurd and it is pathetic, but Charlotte’s supreme ambition at that time was to keep a school, a school of her own, like her friend Miss Wooler.  There was a great innocence and humility in Charlotte.  She was easily taken in by any of those veiled, inimical spectres of the cross-roads that youth mistakes for destiny.  She must have refused to look too closely at the apparition; it was enough for her that she saw in it the divine thing—­liberty.  Her genius was already struggling in her.  She had begun to feel under her shoulders the painful piercing of her wings.  Her friend, Mary Taylor, had written to her from Brussels telling her of pictures and cathedrals.  Charlotte tells how it woke her up.  “I hardly know what swelled in my breast as I read her