And what a fling! It is the way of genius to look after itself. In spite of obstacles, Charlotte Brontë's took hold of every man and woman that crossed and barred its path, and ultimately it avenged itself on Monsieur and on Madame Héger. Those two were made for peaceful, honourable conjugal obscurity, but it was their luck to harbour a half-fledged and obstructed genius in their Pensionnat, a genius thirsting for experience; and somehow, between them, they contrived to make it suffer. That was their tragedy. Monsieur's case is pitiful; for he was kind and well-meaning, and he was fond of Charlotte; and yet, because of Charlotte, there is no peace for him in the place where he has gone. Her genius has done with him, but her ghost, like some malign and awful destiny, pursues him. No sooner does he sink back quiet in his grave than somebody unearths him. Why cannot he be allowed to rest, once for all, in his amiable unimportance? He became, poor man, important only by the use that Charlotte's genius made of him. It seized him as it would have seized on any other interesting material that came its way. Without him we might have had another Rochester, and we should not have had any Paul Emanuel, which would have been a pity; that is all. There is hardly any hope that Brontë specialists will accept this view. For them the sojourn in Brussels will still stand as the turning-point in Charlotte Brontë's career. Yet for her, long afterwards, Brussels must have stood as the danger threatening it. She would have said, I think, that her sojourn in Haworth was the turning-point. It was destiny that turned Emily back to Haworth from the destruction that waited for her at Brussels, so that she conceived and brought forth _Wuthering Heights_; her own destiny that she secretly foreknew, consoling and beneficent. And, no doubt, it was destiny of a sort, unforeknown, deceitful, apparently malignant, that sent Charlotte back again to Brussels after her aunt's death. It wrung from her her greatest book, _Villette_. But Haworth, I think, would have wrung from her another and perhaps a greater.