alent for
cleaning, sweeping up hearths, dusting rooms, making beds, &c.; so, if
everything else fails, I can turn my hand to that, if anybody will
give me good wages for little labour. I won't be a cook; I hate
soothing. I won't be a nurserymaid, nor a lady's-maid, far less a
lady's companion, or a mantua-maker, or a straw-bonnet maker, or a
taker-in of plain work. I won't be anything but a housemaid . . .
With regard to my visit to G., I have as yet received no invitation;
but if I should be asked, though I should feel it a great act of self-
denial to refuse, yet I have almost made up my mind to do so, though
the society of the T.'s is one of the most rousing pleasures I have
ever known. Good-bye, my darling E., &c.

"P. S.--Strike out that word 'darling;' it is humbug. Where's the use
of protestations? We've known each other, and liked each other, a
good while; that's enough."

Not many weeks after this was written, Charlotte also became engaged as a
governess. I intend carefully to abstain from introducing the names of
any living people, respecting whom I may have to tell unpleasant truths,
or to quote severe remarks from Miss Bronte's letters; but it is
necessary that the difficulties she had to encounter in her various
phases of life, should be fairly and frankly made known, before the force
"of what was resisted" can be at all understood. I was once speaking to
her about "Agnes Grey"--the novel in which her sister Anne pretty
literally describes her own experience as a governess--and alluding more
particularly to the account of the stoning of the little nestlings in the
presence of the parent birds. She said that none but those who had been
in the position of a governess could ever realise the dark side of
"respectable" human nature; under no great temptation to crime, but daily
giving way to selfishness and ill-temper, till its conduct towards those
dependent on it sometimes amounts to a tyranny of which one would rather
be the victim than the inflicter. We can only trust in such cases that
the employers err rather from a density of perception and an absence of
sympathy, than from any natural cruelty of disposition. Among several
things of the same kind, which I well remember, she told me what had once
occurred to herself. She had been entrusted with the care of a little
boy, three or four years old, during the absence of his parents on a
day's excursion, a