I said to myself "his Heathcliffe's "walk There was something rough freedom pleases in" expressed the in the forced, stiff me not at all."... sentiment "Go to bow, in the There was something the Deuce."[50]... impatient, yet formal in Mr. Hunsden's I think that tone which seemed ... point-blank mode of circumstance to express: "What the speech which rather determined me Deuce is it to me pleased me than to accept the whether Miss Eyre be otherwise, because it invitation; I felt there or not?[50] At set me at my ease. interested in a this moment I am not I continued the man who seemed disposed to accost conversation with more exaggeratedly her." I sat down, a degree of reserved than quite disembarrassed. interest.... myself. A reception of Hunsden's manner now finished politeness bordered on the would probably have impertinent, still confused me, ... but his manner did not harsh caprice laid me offend me in the under no slightest--it only obligation.... piqued my curiosity; Besides, the I wanted him to go eccentricity of the on. proceeding was piquant. I felt interested to see how he would go on. We read of Rochester:--"The frown, the roughness of the stranger set me at my ease"; and in _Villette_, we read of M. Héger as M. Paul:--"Once ... I held him harsh and strange, ... the darkness, the manner displeased me. Now ... I preferred him before all humanity," which explains why Charlotte Brontë wrote of Rochester:--"The sarcasm that had repelled, the harshness that had startled me once, were only like keen condiments in a choice dish," and explains why she admits to the piquancy in exploiting the possibilities of Heathcliffe's startling harshness. And again, as further evidence of the influence of M. Héger over her Yorkshire Hunsden, we find this character in the close of _The Professor_ implicated with a mysterious "Lucia," whom he would have married but could not, which Lucia we discover to have meant really the original of the Lucy Snowe of _Villette_--Charlotte Brontë herself.