Jane Eyre

Charlotte Brontë
same theme—courtship; and promise to end in the same catastrophe—marriage.”
to Millcote this morning, and will be back here to-night or
“A profound remark! A most ingenious quibble! He went
“And do you like that monotonous theme?”
to-morrow: does that circumstance exclude him from the list
“Positively, I don’t care about it: it is nothing to me.” of your acquaintance—blot him, as it were, out of existence?”
“Nothing to you? When a lady, young and full of life and “No; but I can scarcely see what Mr. Rochester has to do
health, charming with beauty and endowed with the gifts of with the theme you had introduced.”
rank and fortune, sits and smiles in the eyes of a gentleman “I was talking of ladies smiling in the eyes of gentlemen;
you—”
and of late so many smiles have been shed into Mr. Rochester’s
“I what?”
eyes that they overflow like two cups filled above the brim:
“You know—and perhaps think well of.”
have you never remarked that?”
“I don’t know the gentlemen here. I have scarcely interchanged
a syllable with one of them; and as to thinking well “No question about his right: but have you never observed
“Mr. Rochester has a right to enjoy the society of his guests.”
of them, I consider some respectable, and stately, and middleaged,
and others young, dashing, handsome, and lively: but ter has been favoured with the most lively and the most con-
that, of all the tales told here about matrimony, Mr. Roches-
certainly they are all at liberty to be the recipients of whose tinuous?”
smiles they please, without my feeling disposed to consider “The eagerness of a listener quickens the tongue of a narrator.”
I said this rather to myself than to the gipsy, whose strange
the transaction of any moment to me.”
“You don’t know the gentlemen here? You have not exchanged
a syllable with one of them? Will you say that of the dream. One unexpected sentence came from her lips after
talk, voice, manner, had by this time wrapped me in a kind of
master of the house!”
another, till I got involved in a web of mystification; and
“He is not at home.”
wondered what unseen spirit had been sitting for weeks by
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