“‘You commenced it with the intention that it should be mine?’

“‘Undoubtedly.’

“‘And offered on my fete-day?’

“‘Yes.’

“‘This purpose continued as you wove it?’

“‘Again I assented.’

“’Then it is not necessary that I should cut out any portion—­saying, this part is not mine:  it was plaited under the idea and for the adornment of another?’

“‘By no means.  It is neither necessary, nor would it be just.’

“‘This object is all mine?’

“‘That object is yours entirely.’

“Straightway monsieur opened his paletot, arranged the guard splendidly across his chest, displaying as much and suppressing as little as he could:  for he had no notion of concealing what he admired and thought decorative....

“‘A present c’est un fait accompli,’ said he, readjusting his paletot....”

To the last gesture of Monsieur it is superb.

I have taken those scenes because they are of crucial importance as indications of what Charlotte Bronte was doing in Villette, and yet would do.  They show not only an enormous advance in technique, but a sense of the situation, of the scene a faire, which is entirely or almost entirely lacking in her earlier work.

If there be degrees in reality, Lucy and Pauline de Bassompierre are only less real than M. Paul.  And by some miracle their reality is not diminished by Charlotte Bronte’s singular change of intention with regard to these two.  Little Polly, the child of the beginning, the inscrutable creature of nerves, exquisitely sensitive to pain, fretting her heart out in love for her father and for Graham Bretton, is hardly recognizable in Pauline, Countess de Bassompierre.  She has preserved only her fragility, her fastidiousness, her little air of inaccessibility.  Polly is obviously predestined to that profound and tragic suffering which is Lucy Snowe’s.

“I watched Polly rest her small elbow on her small knee, her head on her hand; I observed her draw a square inch or two of pocket-handkerchief from the doll-pocket of her doll-skirt, and then I heard her weep.  Other children in grief or pain cry aloud, without shame or restraint, but this being wept:  the tiniest occasional sniff testified to her emotion.”

Again (Polly is parted from her father):  “When the street-door closed, she dropped on her knees at a chair with a cry—­’Papa!’

“It was low and long; a sort of ‘why hast thou forsaken me?’ During an ensuing space of some minutes I perceived she endured agony.  She went through, in that brief interval of her infant life, emotions such as some never feel; it was in her constitution:  she would have more of such instants if she lived.”