“Brussels, 1842 (May?).

“I was twenty-six years old a week or two since; and at this ripe time of life I am a school-girl, and, on the whole, very happy in that capacity.  It felt very strange at first to submit to authority instead of exercising it—­to obey orders instead of giving them; but I like that state of things.  I returned to it with the same avidity that a cow, that has long been kept on dry hay, returns to fresh grass.  Don’t laugh at my simile.  It is natural to me to submit, and very unnatural to command.

“This is a large school, in which there are about forty externes, or day pupils, and twelve pensionnaires, or boarders.  Madame Heger, the head, is a lady of precisely the same cast of mind, degree of cultivation, and quality of intellect as Miss —–.  I think the severe points are a little softened, because she has not been disappointed, and consequently soured.  In a word, she is a married instead of a maiden lady.  There are three teachers in the school—­Mademoiselle Blanche, Mademoiselle Sophie, and Mademoiselle Marie.  The two first have no particular character.  One is an old maid, and the other will be one.  Mademoiselle Marie is talented and original, but of repulsive and arbitrary manners, which have made the whole school, except myself and Emily, her bitter enemies.  No less than seven masters attend, to teach the different branches of education—­French, Drawing, Music, Singing, Writing, Arithmetic, and German.  All in the house are Catholics except ourselves, one other girl, and the gouvernante of Madame’s children, an Englishwoman, in rank something between a lady’s maid and a nursery governess.  The difference in country and religion makes a broad line of demarcation between us and all the rest.  We are completely isolated in the midst of numbers.  Yet I think I am never unhappy; my present life is so delightful, so congenial to my own nature, compared to that of a governess.  My time, constantly occupied, passes too rapidly.  Hitherto both Emily and I have had good health, and therefore we have been able to work well.  There is one individual of whom I have not yet spoken—­M.  Heger, the husband of Madame.  He is professor of rhetoric, a man of power as to mind, but very choleric and irritable in temperament.  He is very angry with me just at present, because I have written a translation which he chose to stigmatize as ‘peu correct.’  He did not tell me so, but wrote the word on the margin of my book, and asked, in brief stern phrase, how it happened that my compositions were always better than my translations? adding that the thing seemed to him inexplicable.  The fact is, some weeks ago, in a high-flown humour, he forbade me to use either dictionary or grammar in translating the most difficult English compositions into French.  This makes the task rather arduous, and compels me every now and then to introduce an English word, which nearly plucks the eyes out of his head when he sees it.  Emily