Once during a spring-cleaning at Upperwood House Charlotte was Mrs.
White's nursemaid as well as her governess, and she wrote: "By dint of
nursing the fat baby it has got to know me and be fond of me. I suspect
myself of growing rather fond of it." Years later she wrote to Mrs.
Gaskell, after staying with her: "Could you manage to convey a small
kiss to that dear but dangerous little person, Julia? She
surreptitiously possessed herself of a minute fraction of my heart,
which has been missing ever since I saw her."

Mrs. Gaskell tells us that there was "a strong mutual attraction"
between Julia, her youngest little girl, and Charlotte Brontë. "The
child," she says, "would steal her little hand into Miss Brontë's
scarcely larger one, and each took pleasure in this apparently
unobserved caress." May I suggest that children do not steal their
little hands into the hands of people who do not care for them? Their
instinct is infallible.

Charlotte Brontë tried to give an account of her feeling for children;
it was something like the sacred awe of the lover. "Whenever I see
Florence and Julia again I shall feel like a fond but bashful suitor,
who views at a distance the fair personage to whom, in his clownish awe,
he dare not risk a near approach. Such is the clearest idea I can give
you of my feeling towards children I like, but to whom I am a
stranger--and to what children am I not a stranger?"

Extraordinary that Charlotte's critics have missed the pathos of that
_cri de coeur_. It is so clearly an echo from the "house of bondage",
where Charlotte was made a stranger to the beloved, where the beloved
threw stones and Bibles at her. You really have to allow for the shock