describes how a little later she met Charlotte Bronte at a quiet
country-house, and how Charlotte was reduced from tolerable health
to a bad nervous headache by the announcement that they were going
to drive over in the afternoon to have tea at a neighbour's house--
the prospect of meeting strangers was so alarming to her.

But in spite of this agonising susceptibility and vulnerability,
there is never the least touch either of sentimentality or self-
pity about Charlotte Bronte. She stuck to her duty and faced life
with an infinity of patient courage. One of her friends said of her
that no one she had ever known had sacrificed more to others, or
done it with a fuller consciousness of what she was sacrificing. If
duty and affection bade her act, no sense of weakness or of
inclination had any power over her. She was afraid of life, but she
stood up to it; she was never crushed or broken. Consider the
circumstances under which she began to write Jane Eyre. She had
written her novel The Professor, and it was returned to her nine
several times, by publisher after publisher. Her father was
threatened with blindness. She had taken him to Manchester for an
operation, installed him in lodgings, and settled down alone to
nurse him. The ill-fated Professor came back to her once more with
a polite refusal. That very day she wrote the first lines of Jane
Eyre. Later on too, with her brother dying of opium and drink, she
had begun Shirley, and she finished it after the deaths of her
sisters. She was perfectly merciless to herself, saw no reason why
she should be spared any sorrow or suffering or ill-health, but
looked upon it all as a stern but not unjust discipline. She had
one of the most passionately affectionate natures both in
friendship and home relations--"my hot tenacious heart," she once
says! But there was no touch of softness or sentimentality about