I think I may presume so far on old and intimate
acquaintance as to instal myself here till he returns."

His manner was polite; his accent, in speaking, struck me as being
somewhat unusual,--not precisely foreign, but still not altogether
English: his age might be about Mr. Rochester's,--between thirty and
forty; his complexion was singularly sallow: otherwise he was a
fine-looking man, at first sight especially. On closer examination, you
detected something in his face that displeased, or rather that failed to
please. His features were regular, but too relaxed: his eye was large
and well cut, but the life looking out of it was a tame, vacant life--at
least so I thought.

The sound of the dressing-bell dispersed the party. It was not till
after dinner that I saw him again: he then seemed quite at his ease. But
I liked his physiognomy even less than before: it struck me as being at
the same time unsettled and inanimate. His eye wandered, and had no
meaning in its wandering: this gave him an odd look, such as I never
remembered to have seen. For a handsome and not an unamiable-looking
man, he repelled me exceedingly: there was no power in that
smooth-skinned face of a full oval shape: no firmness in that aquiline
nose and small cherry mouth; there was no thought on the low, even
forehead; no command in that blank, brown eye.

As I sat in my usual nook, and looked at him with the light of the
girandoles on the mantelpiece beaming full over him--for he occupied an
arm-chair drawn close to the fire, and kept shrinking still nearer, as if
he were cold, I compared him with Mr. Rochester. I think (with deference
be it spoken) the contrast could not be much greater between a sleek
gander and a fierce falcon: between a meek sheep and the rough-coated
keen-eyed dog, its guardian.

He had spoken of Mr. Rochester as an old friend. A curious friendship
theirs must have been: a pointed illustration, indeed, of the old adage
that "extremes meet."

Two or three of the gentlemen sat near him, and I caught at times scraps
of their conversation across the room. At first I could not make much
sense of what I heard; for the discourse of Louisa Eshton and Mary
Ingram, who sat nearer to me, confused the fragmentary sentences that
reached me at intervals. These last were discussing the stranger; they
both called him "a beautiful man." Louisa said he was "a love of a
creature," and she "adored him;" and Mary instanced his "prett