Charlotte
and Emily went to Brussels to learn. They did learn with energy. It was
their first experience of foreign travel, and it came too late in life
for them to enter into it with that breadth of mind and tolerance of the
customs of other lands, lacking which the Englishman abroad is always an
offence. Charlotte and Emily hated the land and people. They had been
brought up ultra-Protestants. Their father was an Ulster man, and his
one venture into the polemics of his age was to attack the proposals for
Catholic emancipation. With this inheritance of intolerance, how could
Charlotte and Emily face with kindliness the Romanism which they saw
around them? How heartily they disapproved of it many a picture in
_Villette_ has made plain to us.
Charlotte had been in Brussels three months when she made the friendship
to which I am indebted for anything that there may be to add to this
episode in her life. Miss Laetitia Wheelwright was one of five sisters,
the daughters of a doctor in Lower Phillimore Place, Kensington. Dr.
Wheelwright went to Brussels for his health and for his children's
education. The girls were day boarders at the Pensionnat, but they lived
in the house for a full month or more at a time when their father and
mother were on a trip up the Rhine. Otherwise their abode was a flat in
the Hotel Clusyenaar in the Rue Royale, and there during her later stay
in Brussels Charlotte frequently paid them visits.
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