which she treasured as enshrining her ideal in words of passionate epigram. “Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same,” was one of them. “I am Heathcliff!” she could scarcely read without poignant emotion. The enigma of Emily Brontë’s life made her construct many theories to account for the peculiar passion of _Wuthering Heights_.... Sometimes she would think proudly: This is an amazing friendship. We are people in a million. We are immeasurably higher in the human scale than those to whom such a relation as exists between us would be incomprehensible and incredible. It is not love that binds us--that reckless fuser of incompatibilities--it is an affinity of soul, rare, intense, exquisitely subtle.... And also there were moments of terrible lucidity, when the subtleties and complexities resolved themselves into a single pattern of tragic simplicity. She loved him and he did not love her. The relation between them was compounded of nothing but that. Everything else was artificial and a sham.... § 3 Yet platonism was her acknowledged ideal. She was curiously anxious in discussions with him to emphasize it, even to rhapsodize upon it, to pour scorn on the sentimentality that finds it unworkable. She strove to re-create herself on the lines of what she strangely imagined would be his ideal of womanhood. And somehow this re-creation of herself was inextricably bound up with the paramount necessity that their relations must be strictly platonic. She would show him (and herself) that she was capable of maintaining such a relationship. She found a savage pride in the restraints she was called upon to exercise. She took fierce delight in saying things which were not only not true, but which were like knife-thrusts directed against her own heart. Her life became interwoven with intrigue against herself. As time passed, the complexity of what she was attempting began to demand ruthless self-suppression and a constant cumulative duplicity. Some of the traits of her newly manufactured character she identified so thoroughly with herself that she almost forgot whether they were real or not. Some of the lies that she told and acted became as real to her as the truth. Moments came when her brain as well as her soul went reeling under the burden of the tangle she had herself created.