your eyelids, and then I shall have the pleasure of seeing you caress 'the
fair large ears' of some donkey, and hang rapturously upon its bray, till
you perhaps discover that he has pretended, on your account solely, to
like roses, when he has a natural proclivity to thistles; and then,
pitiable child! you will discover what you have been caressing, and--I
spare you conclusions; only, for my part, I pity the animal! Now Jane Eyre
was a highly practical person; she knew the man she loved was only a man,
and rather a bad specimen at that; she was properly indignant at this
further development of his nature, but reflecting in cool blood,
afterward, that it was only his nature, and finding it proper and legal to
marry him, she did so, to the great satisfaction of herself and the
public. _You_ would have made a new ideal of St. John Rivers, who was
infinitely the best material of the two, and possibly gone on to your
dying day in the belief that his cold and hard soul was only the adamant
of the seraph, encouraged in that belief by his real and high principle,--
a thing that went for sounding brass with that worldly-wise little
philosopher, Jane, because it did not act more practically on his inborn
traits."

"Bah!" said Josephine, "when did you turn gypsy, Sally? You ought to sell
_dukkeripen_, and make your fortune. Why don't you unfold Letty's fate?"

"No," said I, laughing. "Don't you know that the afflatus always exhausts
the priestess? You may tell Letty's fortune, or mine, if you will; but my
power is gone."

"I can tell yours easily, O Sibyl!" replied she. "You will never marry,
neither for real nor ideal. You should have fallen in love in the orthodox
way, when you were seventeen. You are adaptive enough to have moulded
yourself into any nature that you loved, and constant enough to have clung
to it through good and evil. You would have been a model wife, and a
blessed mother. But now--you are too old, my dear; you have seen too
much; you have not hardened yourself, but you have learned to see too
keenly into other people. You don't respect men, 'except exceptions'; and
you have seen so much matrimony that is harsh and unlovable, that you
dread it; and yet--Don't look at me that way, Sarah! I shall cry!--My
dear! my darling! I did not mean to hurt you.--I am a perfect fool!--Do
please look at me with your old sweet eyes again!--How could I!"----

"Look at Letty," said I, succeeding at last in a laugh. And really