England for Brussels and Madame Héger's Pensionnat de Demoiselles in the
Rue d'Isabelle. It is supposed to have been the turning-point in
Charlotte's career. She was then twenty-six, Emily twenty-four.

It is absurd and it is pathetic, but Charlotte's supreme ambition at
that time was to keep a school, a school of her own, like her friend
Miss Wooler. There was a great innocence and humility in Charlotte. She
was easily taken in by any of those veiled, inimical spectres of the
cross-roads that youth mistakes for destiny. She must have refused to
look too closely at the apparition; it was enough for her that she saw
in it the divine thing--liberty. Her genius was already struggling in
her. She had begun to feel under her shoulders the painful piercing of
her wings. Her friend, Mary Taylor, had written to her from Brussels
telling her of pictures and cathedrals. Charlotte tells how it woke her
up. "I hardly know what swelled in my breast as I read her letter: such
a vehement impatience of restraint and steady work; such a strong wish
for wings--wings such as wealth can furnish; such an urgent desire to
see, to know, to learn; something internal seemed to expand bodily for a
minute. I was tantalized by the consciousness of faculties unexercised."
But Charlotte's "wings" were not "such as wealth can furnish". They were
to droop, almost to die, in Brussels.

Emily was calmer. Whether she mistook it for her destiny or not, she
seems to have acquiesced when Charlotte showed her the veiled figure at
the cross-roads, to have been led blindfold by Charlotte through the
"streaming and starless darkness" that took them to Brussels. The rest
she endured with a stern and terrible resignation. It is known from her
letters what the Pensionnat was to Charlotte. Heaven only knows what it
must have been to Emily. Charlotte, with her undying passion for
knowledge and the spectacle of the world, with her psychological