The flower-market out of doors, with clove-pinks, tall Mary-lilies, and delicate _roses d’amour_, filling the quaint mediæval square before the beautiful old façade of the Hôtel de Ville; Sainte-Gudule, with its spires and arches; the Montagne de la Cour (almost as steep as Haworth Street), its windows ablaze at night with jewels; the little, lovely park, its great elms just coming into leaf, its statues just bursting from their winter sheaths of straw; the galleries of ancient pictures, their walls a sober glory of colors, blues, deep as a summer night, rich reds, brown-golds, most vivid greens. All this should have made an impression on the two home-keeping girls from Yorkshire; and Charlotte, indeed, perceived something of its beauty and strangeness. But Emily, from a bitter sense of exile, from a natural narrowness of spirit, rebelled against it all as an insult to the memory of her home--she longed, hopelessly, uselessly, for Haworth. The two Brontës were very different to the Belgian school-girls in Madame Héger’s Pensionnat. They were, for one thing, ridiculously old to be at school--twenty-four and twenty-six--and they seemed to feel their position; their speech was strained and odd; all the “sceptical, wicked, immoral French novels, over forty of them, the best substitute for French conversation to be met with,” which the girls had toiled through with so much singleness of spirit, had not cured the broadness of their accent nor the artificial idioms of their Yorkshire French. Monsieur Héger, indeed, considered that they knew no French at all. Their manners, even among English people, were stiff and prim; the hearty, vulgar, genial expansion of their Belgian school-fellows must have made them seem as lifeless as marionettes. Their dress--Haworth had permitted itself to wonder at the uncouthness of those amazing leg-of-mutton sleeves (Emily’s pet whim in and out of fashion), at the ill-cut lankness of those skirts, clumsy enough on round little Charlotte, but a very caricature of mediævalism on Emily’s tall, thin, slender figure. They knew they were not in their element, and kept close together, rarely speaking. Yet, Monsieur Héger, patiently watching, felt the presence of a strange power under those uncouth exteriors. It was with the delight of a botanist discovering a rare plant in his garden, of a politician detecting a future statesman in his nursery, that he perceived the unusual faculty which lifted his two English pupils above their school-fellows.... It was Emily who had the larger share of Monsieur Héger’s admiration.... He gave her credit for logical powers, for a capacity for argument unusual in a man, and rare, indeed, in a woman. She, not Charlotte, was the genius in his eyes, although he complained that her stubborn will rendered her deaf to all reason, when her own determination, or her own sense of right, was concerned.