erly
kissed, and then as tenderly whipped. Emily is just now sitting on the
floor of the bedroom where I am writing, looking at her apples. She
smiled when I gave them and the collar as your presents, with an
expression at once well pleased and slightly surprised."

The religious fervours and the soul-searchings have ceased long ago, so
has Miss Nussey's brief spiritual ascendency. But the friendship and the
letters never cease. They go on for twenty years, through exile and
suffering, through bereavement, through fame and through marriage,
uninterrupted and, except for one brief period, unabridged. There is
nothing in any biography to compare with those letters to Ellen Nussey.
If Charlotte Bronte had not happened to be a great genius as well as a
great woman, they alone would have furnished forth her complete
biography. There is no important detail of her mere life that is not
given in them. Mrs. Gaskell relied almost entirely on them, and on
information supplied to her by Miss Nussey. And each critic and
biographer who followed her, from Sir Wemyss Reid to Mr. Clement
Shorter, drew from the same source. Miss Nussey was almost the only safe
repository of material relating to Charlotte Bronte. She had possessed
hundreds of her letters and, with that amiable weakness which was the
defect of her charming quality, she was unable to withhold any of them
from the importunate researcher. There seems to have been nothing,
except one thing, that Charlotte did not talk about to Miss Nussey when
they sat with their feet on the fender and their hair in curl-papers.
That one thing was her writing. It is quite possible that in those
curl-paper confidences Miss Nussey learnt the truth about Charlotte's
friend, M. Heger. She never learnt anything about Charlotte's genius. In
everything that concerned her genius Charlotte was silent and secret
with her friend. That was the line, the very sharp and impassable line
she drew between her "dear, _dear_ Ellen", her "dearest Nel", and her
sisters, Anne and Emily. The freemasonry of friendship ended there. You
may search in vain through even her later correspondence with Miss
Nussey for any more than perfunctory and extraneous allusions to her
works. It was as if they had never been. Every detail of her daily life
is there, the outer and the inner things, the sewing and ironing and
potato-peeling, together with matters of the heart and soul, searchings,
experiences, agonies; the figures of he