of an experience so blighting. It is all part of the perversity of the
fate that dogged her, that her feeling should have met with that
reverse. But it was there, guarded with a certain shy austerity. She
"suspected" herself of getting rather fond of the baby.

She hid her secret even from herself, as women will hide these things.
But her dreams betrayed her after the way of dreams. Charlotte's dream
(premonitory, she thought, of trouble) was that she carried a little
crying child, and could not still its cry. "She described herself," Mrs.
Gaskell says, "as having the most painful sense of pity for the little
thing, lying _inert_, as sick children do, while she walked about in
some gloomy place with it, such as the aisle of Haworth Church." This
dream she gives to _Jane Eyre_, unconscious of its profound significance
and fitness. It is a pity that Mr. Swinburne did not pay attention to
Charlotte's dream.

All her life, I think, she suffered because of the perpetual insurgence
of this secret, impassioned, maternal energy. Hence the sting of Lewes's
famous criticism, beginning: "The grand function of woman, it must
always be remembered" (as if Charlotte had forgotten it!) "is
Maternity"; and, working up from his criticism of that chapter in
_Shirley_ to a climax of adjuration: "Currer Bell, if under your heart
had ever stirred a child; if to your bosom a babe had ever been
pressed--that mysterious part of your being, towards which all the rest
of it was drawn, in which your whole soul was transported and
absorbed--never could you have _imagined_ such a falsehood as that!" It
was impossible for Charlotte to protest against anything but the
abominable bad taste of Lewes's article, otherwise she might have told
him that she probably knew rather more about those mysteries than he
did. It was she who gave us that supreme image of disastrous love. "I