he subject, implying that it was
cold-blooded. The biographer can quote letters for his purpose, and Mr.
Birrell omits to tell us that Charlotte wrote "had any evil consequences
followed a prolonged stay, I should never have forgiven myself". You are
to imagine that Charlotte could have forgiven herself perfectly well,
for Charlotte "did not care for children".

Mrs. Oliphant does not echo that cry. She was a woman and knew better.

For I believe that here we touch the very heart of the mystery that was
Charlotte Bronte. We would have no right to touch it, to approach it,
were it not that other people have already violated all that was most
sacred and most secret in that mystery, and have given the world a
defaced and disfigured Charlotte Bronte. I believe that this love of
children which even Mr. Swinburne has denied to her, was the key to
Charlotte's nature. We are face to face here, not with a want in her,
but with an abyss, depth beyond depth of tenderness and longing and
frustration, of a passion that found no clear voice in her works,
because it was one with the elemental nature in her, undefined,
unuttered, unutterable.

She was afraid of children; she was awkward with them; because such
passion has shynesses, distances, and terrors unknown to the average
comfortable women who become happy mothers. It has even its perversions,
when love hardly knows itself from hate. Such love demands before all
things possession. It cries out for children of its own flesh and blood.
I believe that there were moments when it was pain for Charlotte to see
the children born and possessed by other women. It must have been agony
to have to look after them, especially when the rule was that they were
not to "love the governess".

The proofs of this are slender, but they are sufficient. There is little
Georgette, the sick child that Lucy nurses in the Pensionnat: "Little
Georgette still piped her plaintive wail, appealing to me by her
familiar term, 'Minnie, Minnie, me very poorly!' till my heart ached."
... "I affected Georgette; she was a sensitive and loving child; to hold
her in my lap, or carry her in my arms, was to me a treat. To-night she
would have me lay my head on the pillow of her crib; she even put her
little arms round my neck. Her clasp and the nestling action with which
she pressed her cheek to mine made me almost cry with a sort of tender
pain."

Once during a spring-cleaning at Upperwood House Charlotte was Mrs.