was not interested in M. Heger nor in his
wife, nor in his educational system. She thought his system was no good
and told him so. What she thought of his wife is not recorded.

Then, in their first year of Brussels, their old aunt, Miss Branwell,
died. That was destiny, the destiny that was so kind to Emily. It sent
her and her sister back to Haworth and it kept her there. Poor Anne was
fairly launched on her career; she remained in her "situation", and
somebody had to look after Mr. Bronte and the house. Things were going
badly and sadly at the Parsonage. Branwell was there, drinking; and
Charlotte was even afraid that her father ... also sometimes ...
perhaps....

She left Emily to deal with them and went back to Brussels as a pupil
teacher, alone. She went in an agony of self-reproach, desiring more and
more knowledge, a perfect, inalienable, indestructible possession of
the German language, and wondering whether it were right to satisfy that
indomitable craving. By giving utterance to this self-reproach, so
passionate, so immense, so disproportioned to the crime, the innocent
Charlotte laid herself open to an unjust suspicion. Innocent and unaware
she went, and--it is her own word--she was "punished" for it.

Nothing that she had yet known of homesickness could compare with that
last year of solitary and unmitigated exile. It is supposed, even by the
charitable, that whatever M. Heger did or did not do for Charlotte, he
did everything for her genius. As a matter of fact, it was at Brussels
that she suffered the supreme and ultimate abandonment. She no longer
felt the wild unknown thing stirring in her with wings. So little could
M. Heger do for it that it refused to inhabit the same house with him.
She records the result of that imprisonment a few weeks after her
release: "There are times now when it appears to me as if all my ideas
and feelings, except a few friendships and affections, are changed from
what they used to be; something in me, which used to be enthusiasm, is
tamed down and broken."

At Brussels surely enlightenment must have come to her. She must have
seen, as Emily saw, that in going that way, she had mistaken and done
violence to her destiny.

She went back to Haworth where it waited for her, where it had turned
even the tragedy of her family to account. Everything conspired to keep
her there. The school was given up. She tells why. "It is on Papa's
account; he is now, as you know, getting ol