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"Then you snatch love and innocence from me? You fling me back on lust for a passion-vice for an occupation?"

"Mr. Rochester, I no more assign this fate to you than I grasp at it for myself. We were born to strive and endure-you as well as I: do so. You will forget me before I forget you."

"You make me a liar by such language: you sully my honour.

I declared I could not change: you tell me to my face I shall change soon.

And what a distortion in your judgment, what a perversity in your ideas, is proved by your conduct! Is it better to drive a fellow-creature to despair than to transgress a mere human law, no man being injured by the breach? for you have neither relatives nor acquaintances whom you need fear to offend by living with me?"

This was true: and while he spoke my very conscience and reason turned traitors against me, and charged me with crime in resisting him.

They spoke almost as loud as Feeling: and that clamoured wildly.

"Oh, comply!" it said.

"Think of his misery; think of his danger-look at his state when left alone; remember his headlong nature; consider the recklessness following on despair-soothe him; save him; love him; tell him you love him and will be his.

Who in the world cares for you? or who will be injured by what you do?"

Still indomitable was the reply-"I care for myself.

The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will respect myself.

I will keep the law given by God; sanctioned by man.

I will hold to the principles received by me when I was sane, and not mad-as I am now.

Laws and principles are not for the times when there is no temptation: they are for such moments as this, when body and soul rise in mutiny against their rigour; stringent are they; inviolate they shall be.

If at my individual convenience I might break them, what would be their worth? They have a worth-so I have always believed; and if I cannot believe it now, it is because I am insane-quite insane: with my veins running fire, and my heart beating faster than I can count its throbs.

Preconceived opinions, foregone determinations, are all I have at this hour to stand by: there I plant my foot."

I did.

Mr. Rochester, reading my countenance, saw I had done so.

His fury was wrought to the highest: he must yield to it for a moment, whatever followed; he crossed the floor and seized my arm and grasped my waist.

He seemed to devour me with his flaming glance: physically, I felt, at the moment, powerless as stubble exposed to the draught and glow of a furnace: mentally, I still possessed my soul, and with it the certainty of ultimate safety.

The soul, fortunately, has an interpreter-often an unconscious, but still a truthful interpreter-in the eye.

My eye rose to his; and while I looked in his fierce face I gave an involuntary sigh; his gripe was painful, and my over-taxed strength almost exhausted.

"Never," said he, as he ground his teeth, "never was anything at once so frail and so indomitable.

A mere reed she feels in my hand!" (And he shook me with the force of his hold.) "I could bend her with my finger and thumb: and what good would it do if I bent, if I uptore, if I crushed her? Consider that eye: consider the resolute, wild, free thing looking out of it, defying me, with more than courage-with a stern triumph.

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