Zionwards, though prejudice and error might occasionally fling a mist over the glorious vision before me, for with all your single-hearted sincerity you have your faults, but I am not like you.  If you knew my thoughts; the dreams that absorb me, and the fiery imagination that at times eats me up, and makes me feel society, as it is, wretchedly insipid, you would pity me, and I dare say despise me.”  Miss Nussey writes again, and Charlotte trembles “all over with excitement” after reading her note.  “I will no longer shrink from your question,” she replies.  “I do wish to be better than I am.  I pray fervently sometimes to be made so ... this very night I will pray as you wish me.”

But Charlotte is not in the least like Ellen Nussey, and she still refuses to be drawn into any return of this dangerous play with a friend’s conscience and her nerves.  “I will not tell you all I think and feel about you, Ellen.  I will preserve unbroken that reserve which alone enables me to maintain a decent character for judgment; but for that, I should long ago have been set down by all who knows me as a Frenchified fool.  You have been very kind to me of late, and gentle, and you have spared me those little sallies of ridicule, which, owing to my miserable and wretched touchiness of character, used formerly to make me wince, as if I had been touched with hot iron.  Things that nobody else cares for enter into my mind and rankle there like venom.  I know these feelings are absurd, and therefore I try to hide them, but they only sting the deeper for concealment.  I’m an idiot!”

Miss Nussey seems to have preserved her calm through all the excitement and to have never turned a hair.  But nothing could have been worse for Charlotte than this sort of thing.  It goes on for years.  It began in eighteen-thirty-three, the third year of their friendship, when she was seventeen.  In ’thirty-seven it is at its height.  Charlotte writes from Dewsbury Moor:  “If I could always live with you, if your lips and mine could at the same time drink the same draught at the same pure fountain of mercy, I hope, I trust, I might one day become better, far better than my evil, wandering thoughts, my corrupt heart, cold to the spirit and warm to the flesh, will now permit me to be.  I often plan the pleasant life we might lead, strengthening each other in the power of self-denial, that hallowed and glowing devotion which the past Saints of God often attained to.”

Now a curious and interesting thing is revealed by this correspondence.  These religious fervours and depressions come on the moment Charlotte leaves Haworth and disappear as soon as she returns.  All those letters were written from Roe Head or Dewsbury Moor, while the Haworth letters of the same period are sane and light-hearted.  And when she is fairly settled at Haworth, instead of emulating the Saints of God, she and Miss Nussey are studying human nature and the art of flirtation as exhibited by curates.  Charlotte administers to her friend a formidable amount of worldly wisdom, thus avenging herself for the dance Miss Nussey led her round the throne of grace.