" I asked myself. "Surely she cannot truly like him, or not
like him with true affection! If she did, she need not coin her smiles
so lavishly, flash her glances so unremittingly, manufacture airs so
elaborate, graces so multitudinous. It seems to me that she might, by
merely sitting quietly at his side, saying little and looking less, get
nigher his heart. I have seen in his face a far different expression
from that which hardens it now while she is so vivaciously accosting him;
but then it came of itself: it was not elicited by meretricious arts and
calculated manoeuvres; and one had but to accept it--to answer what he
asked without pretension, to address him when needful without grimace--and
it increased and grew kinder and more genial, and warmed one like a
fostering sunbeam. How will she manage to please him when they are
married? I do not think she will manage it; and yet it might be managed;
and his wife might, I verily believe, be the very happiest woman the sun
shines on."

I have not yet said anything condemnatory of Mr. Rochester's project of
marrying for interest and connections. It surprised me when I first
discovered that such was his intention: I had thought him a man unlikely
to be influenced by motives so commonplace in his choice of a wife; but
the longer I considered the position, education, &c., of the parties, the
less I felt justified in judging and blaming either him or Miss Ingram
for acting in conformity to ideas and principles instilled into them,
doubtless, from their childhood. All their class held these principles:
I supposed, then, they had reasons for holding them such as I could not
fathom. It seemed to me that, were I a gentleman like him, I would take
to my bosom only such a wife as I could love; but the very obviousness of
the advantages to the husband's own happiness offered by this plan
convinced me that there must be arguments against its general adoption of
which I was quite ignorant: otherwise I felt sure all the world would act
as I wished to act.

But in other points, as well as this, I was growing very lenient to my
master: I was forgetting all his faults, for which I had once kept a
sharp look-out. It had formerly been my endeavour to study all sides of
his character: to take the bad with the good; and from the just weighing
of both, to form an equitable judgment. Now I saw no bad. The sarcasm
that had repelled, the harshness that had startled me once, were only
l