greeted her, she made little of it, scarcely allowing herself to believe that the world really set a high value on her work.  Throughout all the excitement that her books produced, she was almost indifferent.  Brought up as she had been to regard literary work as something beyond the proper limits of her sex, she never could quite rid herself of the belief that in writing successfully, she had made of herself not so much a literary figure as a sort of social curiosity.  Nor was that idea wholly foreign to her time.

Personally Charlotte Bronte was not unattractive.  Though somewhat too slender and pale, and plain of feature, she had a pleasant expression, and her homelier features were redeemed by a strong massive forehead, luxuriant glossy hair, and handsome eyes.  Though she had little faith in her powers of inspiring affection, she attracted people strongly and was well beloved by her friends.  That she could stir romantic sentiment too was attested by the fact that she received and rejected three proposals of marriage from as many suitors, before her acceptance of Mr. Nicholls.

Allusion has been made to the work of Charlotte’s two sisters, Emily and Anne.  Of the two Emily is by far the more remarkable, revealing in the single novel we have from her pen a genius as distinct and individual as that of her more celebrated sister.  Had she lived, it is more than likely that her literary achievements would have rivaled Charlotte’s.

Emily Bronte has always been something of a puzzle to biographers.  She was eccentric, an odd mixture of bashful reserve and unexpected spells of frankness, sweet, gentle, and retiring in disposition, but possessed of great courage.  She was two years younger than Charlotte, but taller.  She was slender, though well formed, and was pale in complexion, with great gray eyes of remarkable beauty.  Emily’s literary work is to be found in the volume of “Poems” of her sisters, her share in that work being considered superior in imaginative quality and in finish to that of the others; and in the novel “Wuthering Heights,” a weird, horrid story of astonishing power, written when she was twenty-eight years of age.  Considered purely as an imaginative work, “Wuthering Heights” is one of the most remarkable stories in English literature, and is worthy to be ranked with the works of Edgar A. Poe.  Many will say that it might better not have been written, so utterly repulsive is it, but others will value it as a striking, though distorted, expression of unmistakable genius.  It is a ghastly and gruesome creation.  Not one bright ray redeems it.  It deals with the most evil characters and the most evil phases of human experience.  But it fascinates.  Heathcliff, the chief figure in the book, is one of the greatest villains in fiction,—­an abhorrent creature,—­strange, monstrous, Frankensteinesque.