e 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