information supplied to her by Miss Nussey.  And each critic and biographer who followed her, from Sir Wemyss Reid to Mr. Clement Shorter, drew from the same source.  Miss Nussey was almost the only safe repository of material relating to Charlotte Bronte.  She had possessed hundreds of her letters and, with that amiable weakness which was the defect of her charming quality, she was unable to withhold any of them from the importunate researcher.  There seems to have been nothing, except one thing, that Charlotte did not talk about to Miss Nussey when they sat with their feet on the fender and their hair in curl-papers.  That one thing was her writing.  It is quite possible that in those curl-paper confidences Miss Nussey learnt the truth about Charlotte’s friend, M. Heger.  She never learnt anything about Charlotte’s genius.  In everything that concerned her genius Charlotte was silent and secret with her friend.  That was the line, the very sharp and impassable line she drew between her “dear, dear Ellen”, her “dearest Nel”, and her sisters, Anne and Emily.  The freemasonry of friendship ended there.  You may search in vain through even her later correspondence with Miss Nussey for any more than perfunctory and extraneous allusions to her works.  It was as if they had never been.  Every detail of her daily life is there, the outer and the inner things, the sewing and ironing and potato-peeling, together with matters of the heart and soul, searchings, experiences, agonies; the figures of her father, her brother, her sisters, move there, vivid and alive; and old Tabby and the curates; and the very animals, Keeper and Flossie, and the little black cat, Tom, that died and made Emily sorry; but of the one thing not a word.  The letters to Ellen Nussey following the publication of Jane Eyre are all full of gossip about Miss Ringrose and the Robinsons.  Presently Ellen hears a rumour of publication.  Charlotte repudiates it and friction follows.

Charlotte writes:  “Dear Ellen,—­write another letter and explain that note of yours distinctly....  Let me know what you heard, and from whom you heard it.  You do wrong to feel pain from any circumstance, or to suppose yourself slighted....”  “Dear Ellen,—­All I can say to you about a certain matter is this:  the report ... must have had its origin in some absurd misunderstanding.  I have given no one a right to affirm or hint in the most distant manner that I am publishing (humbug!).  Whoever has said it—­if anyone has, which I doubt—­is no friend of mine.  Though twenty books were ascribed to me, I should own none.  I scout the idea utterly.  Whoever, after I have distinctly rejected the charge, urges it upon me, will do an unkind and ill-bred thing.”  If Miss Nussey is asked, she is authorized by Miss Bronte to say, “that she repels and disowns every accusation of the kind.  You may add, if you please, that if anyone has her confidence, you believe you have, and she has made no drivelling confessions to you