id you hear the nightingale singing
in that wood?"

Still, she had done it.

And she was the first heroine who had. Adultery, with which we are
fairly familiar, would have seemed a lesser sin. There may be
extenuating circumstances for the adulteress. There were extenuating
circumstances for Rochester. He could plead a wife who went on all
fours. There were no extenuating circumstances for little Jane. No use
for her to say that she was upset by the singing of the nightingale;
that it didn't matter what she said to Mr. Rochester when Mr. Rochester
was going to marry Blanche Ingram, anyway; that she only flung herself
at his head because she knew she couldn't hit it; that her plainness
gave her a certain licence, placing her beyond the code. Not a bit of
it. Jane's plainness was one thing that they had against her. Until her
time no heroine had been permitted to be plain. Jane's seizing of the
position was part of the general insolence of her behaviour.

Jane's insolence was indeed unparalleled. Having done the deed she felt
no shame or sense of sin; she stood straight up and defended herself.
That showed that she was hardened.

It certainly showed--Jane's refusal to be abject--that Jane was far
ahead of her age.

"'I tell you I must go!' I retorted, roused to something like passion.
'Do you think I can stay to become nothing to you? Do you think I am an
automaton?--a machine without feelings, and can bear to have my morsel
of bread snatched from my lips, and my drop of living water dashed from
my cup? Do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain and little, I am
soulless and heartless? You think wrong! I have as much soul as you, and
fully as much heart! And if God had gifted me with some beauty and much
wealth, I should have made it as hard for you to leave me as it is now
for me to leave you. I am not talking to you now through the medium of
custom, conventionalities, or even of mortal flesh: it is my spirit that
addresses'" ("Addresses"? oh, Jane!) "'your spirit; just as if both had
passed through the grave, and we stood at God's feet, equal--as we
are!'"

This, allowing for some slight difference in the phrasing, is twentieth
century. And it was this--Jane's behaviour in the orchard, and not
Rochester's behaviour in the past--that opened the door to the "imps of
evil meaning, polluting and defiling the domestic hearth."

Still, though _The Quarterly_ censured Jane's behaviour, it was
Rochester who caused