t I still see the
consultation which followed each scene: I see Mr. Rochester turn to Miss
Ingram, and Miss Ingram to him; I see her incline her head towards him,
till the jetty curls almost touch his shoulder and wave against his
cheek; I hear their mutual whisperings; I recall their interchanged
glances; and something even of the feeling roused by the spectacle
returns in memory at this moment.

I have told you, reader, that I had learnt to love Mr. Rochester: I could
not unlove him now, merely because I found that he had ceased to notice
me--because I might pass hours in his presence, and he would never once
turn his eyes in my direction--because I saw all his attentions
appropriated by a great lady, who scorned to touch me with the hem of her
robes as she passed; who, if ever her dark and imperious eye fell on me
by chance, would withdraw it instantly as from an object too mean to
merit observation. I could not unlove him, because I felt sure he would
soon marry this very lady--because I read daily in her a proud security
in his intentions respecting her--because I witnessed hourly in him a
style of courtship which, if careless and choosing rather to be sought
than to seek, was yet, in its very carelessness, captivating, and in its
very pride, irresistible.

There was nothing to cool or banish love in these circumstances, though
much to create despair. Much too, you will think, reader, to engender
jealousy: if a woman, in my position, could presume to be jealous of a
woman in Miss Ingram's. But I was not jealous: or very rarely;--the
nature of the pain I suffered could not be explained by that word. Miss
Ingram was a mark beneath jealousy: she was too inferior to excite the
feeling. Pardon the seeming paradox; I mean what I say. She was very
showy, but she was not genuine: she had a fine person, many brilliant
attainments; but her mind was poor, her heart barren by nature: nothing
bloomed spontaneously on that soil; no unforced natural fruit delighted
by its freshness. She was not good; she was not original: she used to
repeat sounding phrases from books: she never offered, nor had, an
opinion of her own. She advocated a high tone of sentiment; but she did
not know the sensations of sympathy and pity; tenderness and truth were
not in her. Too often she betrayed this, by the undue vent she gave to a
spiteful antipathy she had conceived against little Adele: pushing her
away with some contumelious epithet if