Postlethwaite, and sit drinking tea, and talking scandal with old
ladies. As for the young ones! I have one sitting by me just
now--fair-faced, blue-eyed, dark-haired, sweet eighteen--she little
thinks the devil is so near her!"--and a great deal more in the same
silly, post-Byronic strain.

In his postscript Branwell says: "Of course you won't show this letter",
and of course John Brown showed it all round. It was far too good to be
kept to himself; John Brown's brother thought it so excellent that he
committed it to memory. This was hard on Branwell. The letter is too
fantastic to be used against him as evidence of his extreme depravity,
but it certainly lends some support to Mrs. Gaskell's statements that he
had begun already, at two-and-twenty, to be an anxiety to his family.
Haworth, that schooled his sisters to a high and beautiful austerity,
was bad for Branwell.

He stayed with Mr. Postlethwaite for a month longer than Charlotte
stayed with the Sidgwicks.

Then, for a whole year, Charlotte was at Haworth, doing housemaid's
work, and writing poems, and amusing herself at the expense of her
father's curates. She had begun to find out the extent to which she
could amuse herself. She also had had "her chance". She had refused two
offers of marriage, preferring the bondage and the exile that she knew.
Nothing more exhilarating than a proposal that you have rejected. Those
proposals did Charlotte good. But it was not marriage that she wanted.
She found it (for a year) happiness enough to be at Haworth, to watch
the long comedy of the curates as it unrolled itself before her. She saw
most things that summer (her twenty-fifth) with the ironic eyes of the
comic spirit, even Branwell. She wrote to Miss Nussey: "A distant