, pleased his eyes. I told him to open it.

"'My initials!' said he, indicating the letters in the lid. 'Who told
you I was called Carl David?'

"'A little bird, monsieur.'

"'Does it fly from me to you? Then one can tie a message under its wing
when needful.'

"He took out the chain--a trifle indeed as to value, but glossy with
silk and sparkling with beads. He liked that too--admired it artlessly,
like a child.

"'For me?'

"'Yes, for you.'

"'This is the thing you were working at last night?'

"'The same.'

"'You finished it this morning?'

"'I did.'

"'You commenced it with the intention that it should be mine?'

"'Undoubtedly.'

"'And offered on my fete-day?'

"'Yes.'

"'This purpose continued as you wove it?'

"'Again I assented.'

"'Then it is not necessary that I should cut out any portion--saying,
this part is not mine: it was plaited under the idea and for the
adornment of another?'

"'By no means. It is neither necessary, nor would it be just.'

"'This object is _all_ mine?'

"'That object is yours entirely.'

"Straightway monsieur opened his paletot, arranged the guard splendidly
across his chest, displaying as much and suppressing as little as he
could: for he had no notion of concealing what he admired and thought
decorative....

"'_A present c'est un fait accompli_,' said he, readjusting his
paletot...."

To the last gesture of Monsieur it is superb.

I have taken those scenes because they are of crucial importance as
indications of what Charlotte Bronte was doing in _Villette_, and yet
would do. They show not only an enormous advance in technique, but a
sense of the situation, of the _scene a faire_, which is entirely or
almost entirely lacking in her earlier work.

If there be degrees in reality, Lucy and Pauline de Bassompierre are
only less real than M. Paul. And by some miracle their reality is not
diminished by Charlotte Bronte's singular change of intention with
regard to these two. Little Polly, the child of the beginning, the
inscrutable creature of nerves, exquisitely sensitive to pain, fretting
her heart out in love for her father and for Graham Bretton, is hardly
recognizable in Pauline, Countess de Bassompierre. She has preserved
only her fragility, her fastidiousness, her little air of
inaccessibility. Polly is obviously predestined to that profound and
tragic suffering which is Lucy Snowe's.

"I watched Polly rest her small elbow on her small knee, her