"'I hardly know, sir; I have little experience of them; they are generally thought pleasant things.'" Charlotte Brontë was on her own ground there. But you tremble when she leaves it; you shudder throughout the awful drawing-room comedy of Blanche Ingram. Blanche says to her mother: "Am I right, Baroness Ingram of Ingram Park?" And her mother says to Blanche, "My lily-flower, you are right now, as always." Blanche says to Rochester, "Signor Eduardo, are you in voice to-night?" and he, "Donna Bianca, if you command it, I will be." And Blanche says to the footman, "Cease that chatter, blockhead, and do my bidding." That, Charlotte's worst lapse, is a very brief one, and the scene itself is unimportant. But what can be said of the crucial scene of the novel, the tremendous scene of passion and temptation? There _is_ passion in the scene before it, between Jane and Rochester on the afternoon of the wedding-day that brought no wedding. "'Jane, I never meant to wound you thus. If the man who had but one little ewe lamb that was dear to him as a daughter, that ate of his bread, and drank of his cup, and lay in his bosom, had by some mistake slaughtered it at the shambles, he would not have rued his bloody blunder more than I now rue mine. Will you ever forgive me?'... 'You know I am a scoundrel, Jane?' ere long he inquired wistfully, wondering, I suppose, at my continued silence and tameness; the result of weakness rather than of will. "'Yes, sir.' "'Then tell me so roundly and sharply--don't spare me.' "'I cannot; I am tired and sick. I want some water.' "He heaved a sort of shuddering sigh, and, taking me in his arms, carried me downstairs." But there are terrible lapses. After Rochester's cry, "'Jane, my little darling ... If you were mad, do you think I should hate you,'" he elaborates his idea and he is impossible: "'Your mind is my treasure, and if it were broken it would be my treasure still; if you raved, my arms should confine you and not a strait waistcoat--your grasp, even in fury, would have a charm for me; if you flew at me as wildly as that woman did this morning, I should receive you in an embrace at least as fond as it would be restrictive.'" And in the final scene of temptation there is a most curious mingling of reality and unreality, of the passion which is poetry, and the poetry which is not passion.