Charlotte writes: "Dear Ellen,--write another letter and explain that note of yours distinctly.... Let me know what you heard, and from whom you heard it. You do wrong to feel pain from any circumstance, or to suppose yourself slighted...." "Dear Ellen,--All I can say to you about a certain matter is this: the report ... must have had its origin in some absurd misunderstanding. I have given _no one_ a right to affirm or hint in the most distant manner that I am publishing (humbug!). Whoever has said it--if anyone has, which I doubt--is no friend of mine. Though twenty books were ascribed to me, I should own none. I scout the idea utterly. Whoever, after I have distinctly rejected the charge, urges it upon me, will do an unkind and ill-bred thing." If Miss Nussey is asked, she is authorized by Miss Brontë to say, "that she repels and disowns every accusation of the kind. You may add, if you please, that if anyone has her confidence, you believe you have, and she has made no drivelling confessions to you on that subject." "Dear Ellen,--I shall begin by telling you that you have no right to be angry at the length of time I have suffered to slip by since receiving your last, without answering it; because you have often kept me waiting much longer, and having made this gracious speech, thereby obviating reproaches, I will add that I think it a great shame, when you receive a long and thoroughly interesting letter, full of the sort of details you fully relish, to read the same with selfish pleasure, and not even have the manners to thank your correspondent, and express how very much you enjoyed the narrative. I _did_ enjoy the narrative in your last very keenly.... Which of the Miss Woolers did you see at Mr. Allbutts?"
A beautiful but most unequal friendship. "The sort of details you fully relish--" How that phrase must have rankled! You can hear the passionate protest: "Those details are not what I relish in the least. Putting me off with your Woolers and your Allbutts! If only you had told me about _Jane Eyre_!" For it turned out that all the time Mary Taylor had been told. The inference was that Mary Taylor, with her fits of caution, could be trusted.
This silence of Charlotte's must have been most painful and incomprehensible to the poor Ellen who was Caroline Helstone. She had been the first to divine Charlotte's secret; for she kept the letters. She must have felt like some tender and worshipping wife to whom all doors in the house of the beloved are thrown open, except the door of the sanctuary, which is persistently slammed in her charming face. There must have come to her moments of terrible insight when she felt the danger and the mystery of the flaming spirit she had tried to hold. But Charlotte's friend can wear her half-pathetic immortality with grace. She could at least say: "She told me things she never told anyone else. I have hundreds of her letters. And I had her heart."