ory and in modern record: she shall taste, too, of the life of cities;
and she shall learn to value herself by just comparison with others."

"Shall I travel?--and with you, sir?"

"You shall sojourn at Paris, Rome, and Naples: at Florence, Venice, and
Vienna: all the ground I have wandered over shall be re-trodden by you:
wherever I stamped my hoof, your sylph's foot shall step also. Ten years
since, I flew through Europe half mad; with disgust, hate, and rage as my
companions: now I shall revisit it healed and cleansed, with a very angel
as my comforter."

I laughed at him as he said this. "I am not an angel," I asserted; "and
I will not be one till I die: I will be myself. Mr. Rochester, you must
neither expect nor exact anything celestial of me--for you will not get
it, any more than I shall get it of you: which I do not at all
anticipate."

"What do you anticipate of me?"

"For a little while you will perhaps be as you are now,--a very little
while; and then you will turn cool; and then you will be capricious; and
then you will be stern, and I shall have much ado to please you: but when
you get well used to me, you will perhaps like me again,--_like_ me, I
say, not _love_ me. I suppose your love will effervesce in six months,
or less. I have observed in books written by men, that period assigned
as the farthest to which a husband's ardour extends. Yet, after all, as
a friend and companion, I hope never to become quite distasteful to my
dear master."

"Distasteful! and like you again! I think I shall like you again, and
yet again: and I will make you confess I do not only _like_, but _love_
you--with truth, fervour, constancy."

"Yet are you not capricious, sir?"

"To women who please me only by their faces, I am the very devil when I
find out they have neither souls nor hearts--when they open to me a
perspective of flatness, triviality, and perhaps imbecility, coarseness,
and ill-temper: but to the clear eye and eloquent tongue, to the soul
made of fire, and the character that bends but does not break--at once
supple and stable, tractable and consistent--I am ever tender and true."

"Had you ever experience of such a character, sir? Did you ever love
such an one?"

"I love it now."

"But before me: if I, indeed, in any respect come up to your difficult
standard?"

"I never met your likeness. Jane, you please me, and you master me--you
seem to submit, and I like the sense of pliancy you impar