. He is rich, is he not?"

"Oh! yes. But you see there is a considerable difference in age: Mr.
Rochester is nearly forty; she is but twenty-five."

"What of that? More unequal matches are made every day."

"True: yet I should scarcely fancy Mr. Rochester would entertain an idea
of the sort. But you eat nothing: you have scarcely tasted since you
began tea."

"No: I am too thirsty to eat. Will you let me have another cup?"

I was about again to revert to the probability of a union between Mr.
Rochester and the beautiful Blanche; but Adele came in, and the
conversation was turned into another channel.

When once more alone, I reviewed the information I had got; looked into
my heart, examined its thoughts and feelings, and endeavoured to bring
back with a strict hand such as had been straying through imagination's
boundless and trackless waste, into the safe fold of common sense.

Arraigned at my own bar, Memory having given her evidence of the hopes,
wishes, sentiments I had been cherishing since last night--of the general
state of mind in which I had indulged for nearly a fortnight past; Reason
having come forward and told, in her own quiet way a plain, unvarnished
tale, showing how I had rejected the real, and rabidly devoured the
ideal;--I pronounced judgment to this effect:--

That a greater fool than Jane Eyre had never breathed the breath of life;
that a more fantastic idiot had never surfeited herself on sweet lies,
and swallowed poison as if it were nectar.

"_You_," I said, "a favourite with Mr. Rochester? _You_ gifted with the
power of pleasing him? _You_ of importance to him in any way? Go! your
folly sickens me. And you have derived pleasure from occasional tokens
of preference--equivocal tokens shown by a gentleman of family and a man
of the world to a dependent and a novice. How dared you? Poor stupid
dupe!--Could not even self-interest make you wiser? You repeated to
yourself this morning the brief scene of last night?--Cover your face and
be ashamed! He said something in praise of your eyes, did he? Blind
puppy! Open their bleared lids and look on your own accursed
senselessness! It does good to no woman to be flattered by her superior,
who cannot possibly intend to marry her; and it is madness in all women
to let a secret love kindle within them, which, if unreturned and
unknown, must devour the life that feeds it; and, if discovered and
responded to, must lead, _ignis-fatus_-like