less, I had nothing left to think of but the only
piece of advice your friend Henry Rochester gave me when he sent me
out into the world. The sting of his voice was like a lash. Creatures
of the gutter he called those who had failed, and who dared to live
on. I tell you that until the time came when I looked down into the
Thames, and hesitated whether or no I should take his cynical advice
and make an end of myself, every action, every endeavor, and every
effort I had made, had been honest. It was his words, and his words
entirely, which drove me into the other paths."

"You admit, then--" she began.

"I admit nothing," he answered. "Yet I will tell you this. There are
things in my life which I loathe, and they are there because of
Rochester's words. Yet bad though I am," he continued, bitterly, "that
man's contempt is like a whip to me whenever I see him. What, in
God's name, is he? Because he has ancestors behind him, good blood in
his veins, the tricks of a man of breeding, the carriage and voice of
a gentleman, why, in Heaven's name for these things should he look
upon me as something crawling upon the face of the earth--something to
be spurned aside whenever it should cross his path? I have lived and
spoken falsehoods. The greatest men in the world have lived and spoken
falsehoods. But I am not a charlatan. I have mastered the rudiments of
a great and mighty new science. I am not a trickster. I have a claim
to live, as he has. There is a place in the world for me, too, as well
as for him. You know what he has told me? You know with what he has
threatened me? He has told me that if he even sees you and me
together, that if I even dare to find my way into your presence, that
he will horse-whip me. This because he has muscles and I have none.
Yet you ask me why I desire to kill him! I have had only one desire in
my life stronger than that, one thing in my life more intense than my
hatred of this man."

"You are both in the wrong," she said. "Henry Rochester is a
straight-living, God-fearing man, a little narrow in his views, and a
little violent in his prejudices. You are a person such as he would
not understand, such as he never could understand. You and he could
never possibly come into sympathy. He is wrong when he utters such
threats. Yet you must remember that there is Lois. He has the right
there to say what he will."

"There is Lois, yes!" Saton repeated.

"You wish to marry her, don't you?" she asked.