The circumstance that explains the fact of Madame Heger's altered conduct and feeling towards the English under-mistress whom only a few months earlier she had invited to use her own sitting-room, and to regard herself as a member of the family, and whom _now_ she scarcely speaks to, and thinks should find companions with the other under-mistresses, is a discovery that Madame probably made, before even Charlotte herself had fully recognised what had happened. This discovery is that a change has taken place in Charlotte's sentiment towards her 'Master in literature'; a sentiment that at first had not transgressed the limits of a cordial and affectionate appreciation of his kindness and of his talent and charm and power as a teacher--approved of by Madame Heger as a becoming sentiment in this young person, convenient, 'convenable.' But as Charlotte's exclusive pleasure in M. Heger's society and conversation increases, with her distaste for the society and conversation of every one else with whom she is now in daily contact, and as the charm of his original personality grows, with her sense of the natural disparity between herself and the self-controlled Directress, whose rule of life is respect for what is _convenient,_ in the French sense of _la convenance_ (_i.e._ what is _becoming_) and of revolt against the vulgarity and profligacy she finds as the distinguishing characteristics of her fellow-governesses, this sentiment becomes transformed (insensibly and fatally, without her knowledge or will) into a passionate personal devotion--in other words, into a sentiment that does transgress very seriously indeed the limits of the sort of feeling that Madame Heger, in her double character of directress of a highly esteemed Pensionnat de Demoiselles, and of the wife of Monsieur Heger--esteems 'convenient,' in the case of an under-mistress in her establishment. It was not a question of ordinary jealousy at all. Madame Heger, a much more attractive woman than Charlotte Brontë in so far as her personal appearance was concerned, was absolutely convinced of the affection and fidelity of her husband, and of the entirely and exclusively professorial interest he took in assisting this clever and zealous and meritorious daughter of an evangelical Pastor, to qualify herself for a schoolmistress in her own country. It was entirely a question of the '_inconvenience_'--the unbecoming character of this unfortunate infatuation, that renders it entirely intolerable; something that must be got rid of at once; but as quietly as possible, without exciting remark, and with as much consideration for this imprudent, unhappy 'Mees Charlotte' as possible. The whole affair is a misfortune, of course, 'un malheur': but what one has to do, now it _has_ arrived, is to guard against even greater 'malheurs' for everybody concerned. For 'Mees Charlotte' herself, first of all--what a 'malheur' should this 'infatuation,' involuntary and blameless in intention, no doubt, but so