Roe Head or Dewsbury Moor, while the Haworth letters
of the same period are sane and light-hearted. And when she is fairly
settled at Haworth, instead of emulating the Saints of God, she and Miss
Nussey are studying human nature and the art of flirtation as exhibited
by curates. Charlotte administers to her friend a formidable amount of
worldly wisdom, thus avenging herself for the dance Miss Nussey led her
round the throne of grace.

For, though that morbid excitement and introspection belonged solely to
Charlotte's days of exile, Miss Nussey was at the bottom of it. Mary
Taylor would have been a far robuster influence. But Charlotte's
friendship for Mary Taylor, warm as it was, strikes cold beside her
passionate affection for Ellen Nussey. She brought her own fire to that,
and her own extraordinary capacity for pain. Her letters show every
phase of this friendship, its birth, its unfolding; and then the sudden
leaping of the flame, its writhing and its torture. She writes with a
lover's ardour and impatience. "Write to me very soon and dispel my
uncertainty, or I shall get impatient, almost irritable." "I read your
letter with dismay. Ellen--what shall I do without you? Why are we to be
denied each other's society? It is an inscrutable fatality.... Why are
we to be divided?" (She is at Roe Head, and Roe Head suggests the
answer.) "Surely, Ellen, it must be because we are in danger of loving
each other too well--of losing sight of the _Creator_ in idolatry of the
_creature_." She prays to be resigned, and records "a sweet, placid
sensation like those that I remember used to visit me when I was a
little child, and on Sunday evenings in summer stood by the window
reading the life of a certain French nobleman who attained a purer and
higher degree of sanctity than has been known since the days of the
Early Martyrs. I thought of my own Ellen--" "I wish I could see you, my
darling; I have lavished the warmest affections of a very hot tenacious
heart upon you; if you grow cold, it is over." She was only twenty-one.

A few more years and the leaping and the writhing and the torture cease,
the fire burns to a steady, inextinguishable glow. There is gaiety in
Charlotte's tenderness. She is "infuriated" on finding a jar in her
trunk. "At first I hoped it was empty, but when I found it heavy and
replete, I could have hurled it all the way back to Birstall. However,
the inscription A.B. softened me much. You ought first to be tend