“Wasn’t ‘Jane Eyre’ just a little—naughty? I fancy I have heard something of the kind.”
Our English cousins “farncy” quite as often as we “guess,” or “reckon,” or “presume,” and sometimes as incorrectly.
I waived the subject of Jane Eyre’s morals by a brief tribute to the author’s genius, and passed to Mrs. Gaskell’s description of the West Riding town, Haworth. Our hostess caught the word “Keighley.”
“I was in Keighley last year, at a wedding,” she interpolated. “It is near Haworth—did you say? And you have friends in Haworth?”
I explained.
“Ah!” politely. “I did not know Charlotte Brontë ever lived there. Her ‘Jane Eyre’ was a good deal talked about when I was a girl. She was English—did you say?”
Dropping the topic for that of certain local antiquities, I discussed these with my gentle neighbor until I happened to mention the name of an early Saxon king.
“The familiarity, of Americans with early English history quite astonishes me,” she remarked. “I cannot understand why they should be conversant with what concerns them so remotely.”
I suggested that their history was also ours until within a hundred years. That their great men in letters, statesmanship and war belonged to us up to that time as much as to the dwellers upon English soil, the two countries being under one and the same government.
The blue eyes were slightly hazy with bewilderment.