letter:  such a vehement impatience of restraint and steady work; such a strong wish for wings—­wings such as wealth can furnish; such an urgent desire to see, to know, to learn; something internal seemed to expand bodily for a minute.  I was tantalized by the consciousness of faculties unexercised.”  But Charlotte’s “wings” were not “such as wealth can furnish”.  They were to droop, almost to die, in Brussels.

Emily was calmer.  Whether she mistook it for her destiny or not, she seems to have acquiesced when Charlotte showed her the veiled figure at the cross-roads, to have been led blindfold by Charlotte through the “streaming and starless darkness” that took them to Brussels.  The rest she endured with a stern and terrible resignation.  It is known from her letters what the Pensionnat was to Charlotte.  Heaven only knows what it must have been to Emily.  Charlotte, with her undying passion for knowledge and the spectacle of the world, with her psychological interest in M. Heger and his wife, Charlotte hardly came out of it with her soul alive.  But Emily was not interested in M. Heger nor in his wife, nor in his educational system.  She thought his system was no good and told him so.  What she thought of his wife is not recorded.

Then, in their first year of Brussels, their old aunt, Miss Branwell, died.  That was destiny, the destiny that was so kind to Emily.  It sent her and her sister back to Haworth and it kept her there.  Poor Anne was fairly launched on her career; she remained in her “situation”, and somebody had to look after Mr. Bronte and the house.  Things were going badly and sadly at the Parsonage.  Branwell was there, drinking; and Charlotte was even afraid that her father ... also sometimes ... perhaps....

She left Emily to deal with them and went back to Brussels as a pupil teacher, alone.  She went in an agony of self-reproach, desiring more and more knowledge, a perfect, inalienable, indestructible possession of the German language, and wondering whether it were right to satisfy that indomitable craving.  By giving utterance to this self-reproach, so passionate, so immense, so disproportioned to the crime, the innocent Charlotte laid herself open to an unjust suspicion.  Innocent and unaware she went, and—­it is her own word—­she was “punished” for it.

Nothing that she had yet known of homesickness could compare with that last year of solitary and unmitigated exile.  It is supposed, even by the charitable, that whatever M. Heger did or did not do for Charlotte, he did everything for her genius.  As a matter of fact, it was at Brussels that she suffered the supreme and ultimate abandonment.  She no longer felt the wild unknown thing stirring in her with wings.  So little could M. Heger do for it that it refused to inhabit the same house with him.  She records the result of that imprisonment a few weeks after her release:  “There are times now when it appears to me as if all my ideas and feelings, except a few friendships and affections, are changed from what they used to be; something in me, which used to be enthusiasm, is tamed down and broken.”