flash of revelation in her reply to "the note you sent me with the
umbrella". "My darling, if I were like you, I should have to face
Zionwards, though prejudice and error might occasionally fling a mist
over the glorious vision before me, for with all your single-hearted
sincerity you have your faults, but _I_ am not like you. If you knew my
thoughts; the dreams that absorb me, and the fiery imagination that at
times eats me up, and makes me feel society, as it is, wretchedly
insipid, you would pity me, and I dare say despise me." Miss Nussey
writes again, and Charlotte trembles "all over with excitement" after
reading her note. "I will no longer shrink from your question," she
replies. "I _do_ wish to be better than I am. I pray fervently sometimes
to be made so ... this very night I will pray as you wish me."

But Charlotte is not in the least like Ellen Nussey, and she still
refuses to be drawn into any return of this dangerous play with a
friend's conscience and her nerves. "I will not tell you all I think and
feel about you, Ellen. I will preserve unbroken that reserve which alone
enables me to maintain a decent character for judgment; but for that, I
should long ago have been set down by all who knows me as a Frenchified
fool. You have been very kind to me of late, and gentle, and you have
spared me those little sallies of ridicule, which, owing to my miserable
and wretched touchiness of character, used formerly to make me wince, as
if I had been touched with hot iron. Things that nobody else cares for
enter into my mind and rankle there like venom. I know these feelings
are absurd, and therefore I try to hide them, but they only sting the
deeper for concealment. I'm an idiot!"

Miss Nussey seems to have preserved her calm through all the excitement
and to have never turned a hair. But nothing could have been worse for
Charlotte than this sort of thing. It goes on for years. It began in