d yet she found in it the secret fire of youth. She went to it afraid;
and in her third month of marriage she still gives a cry wrung from the
memory of her fear. "Indeed, indeed, Nell, it is a solemn and strange
and perilous thing for a woman to become a wife."

And yet for all that, after London, after fame and friendships in which
her dead had no share, her marriage was not the great departure; it was
the great return. It was the outcome of all that had gone before it; the
fruit of painful life, which is recognition, acceptance, the final trust
in destiny. There were to be no more false starts, no more veiled ghosts
of the cross-roads, pointing the disastrous way.

And in its abrupt and pitiful end her life rang true; it sustained the
tragic harmony. It was the fulfilment of secret prophecies, forebodings,
premonitions, of her reiterated "It was not to be." You may say that in
the end life cheated and betrayed her.

And inevitably; for she had loved life, not as Emily loved it, like an
equal, with power over it and pride and an unearthly understanding,
virgin and unafraid. There was something slightly subservient,
consciously inferior, in Charlotte's attitude to life. She had loved it
secretly, with a sort of shame, with a corroding passion and incredulity
and despair. Such natures are not seldom victims of the power they would
propitiate. It killed her in her effort to bring forth life.

When the end came she could not realize it. For the first time she was
incredulous of disaster. She heard, out of her last stupor, her husband
praying that God would spare her, and she whispered, "Oh, I am not going
to die, am I? He will not separate us; we have been so happy."

You can see her youth rising up beside that death-bed and answering,
"That is why."

And yet, could even Charlotte's youth have been so sure as to the
cheating and betrayal? That happiness of hers was cut short in the
moment of its perfection. She was not to suffer any disenchantment or
decline; her love was not to know any cold of fear or her genius any
fever of frustration. She was saved the struggle we can see before her.
Arthur Nicholls was passionately fond of Charlotte. But he was hostile
to Charlotte's genius and to Charlotte's fame. A plain, practical,
robust man, inimical to any dream. He could be adorably kind to a sick,
submissive Charlotte. Would he have been so tender to a Charlotte in
revolt? She was spared the torture of the choice betwee