It is reasonable to imagine that at Law Hill she met and fell ardently in love with another woman—whether teaching colleague or senior student—and that the emotion was sufficiently mutual for Emily to envision some such lasting companionship as Charlotte dreamed of with Ellen Nussey. (Indeed, Moore’s emphasis upon the beauty, intellectual and social capacities, and personal charm of Miss Elizabeth Patchett, the school’s forty-four-year-old headmistress, suggests the possibility of Emily’s superior having lit the flame reflected in her verse.) The pattern of such dormitory dramas, whoever the actors, is fairly constant. One young woman is aglow with excitement and an often illusory sense of complete rapport; the other is flattered and genuinely responsive until the emotional voltage runs too high. Then withdrawal follows on the one side, hurt and misunderstanding on the other. Whether Emily encountered Victorian admonition from a colleague, or the news from some charming young creature (as she toyed with her new ring) that _she_ was about to enter love’s _real_ province, it is certain that Emily felt herself “betrayed.” Actually, this proud woman of twenty or twenty-one, in the grip of authentic passion, must have been brought to see her feeling through other eyes as something between a juvenile _Schwarm_ and that horror the very name of which Saint Paul forbade to be uttered. It is probable that she became at once either physically or nervously ill and perhaps left the school (inexplicable in the middle of a term), hiding jealously the reason for her going, and blotting it from all records. (Interestingly enough Moore tells us that Miss Patchett married a local vicar “shortly after Emily’s departure from Law Hill.” Was it her halls that were lit, and for her wedding, in November 1838?)[8] A blow like this—the realization that the only love of which she seemed capable was regarded by the world as either frivolous or sinful—would explain her subsequent melancholy and her stubborn refusal to enter again into any personal relationship. It also colored her memories of Law Hill so that a decade later she used details of the buildings and environs to describe Wuthering Heights farm, the setting in which, as the dark-spirited Heathcliff, she finally wrought vicarious revenge upon a vain and inconstant Cathy.