ou, sir?'
'You shall sojourn at paris, Rome, and Naples: at Florence, Venice, and Vienna: all the ground I have wandered over shall be re-trodden by you: wherever I stamped my hoof, your sylph's foot shall step also.
Ten years since, I flew through Europe half mad; with disgust, hate, and rage as my companions: now I shall revisit it healed and cleaned, with a very angel as my comforter.'
I laughed at him as he said this. 'I am not an angel,' I asserted; 'and I will not be one till I die: I will be myself. Mr. Rochester, you must neither expect nor exact anything celestial of me- for you will not get it, any more than I shall get it of you: which I do not at all anticipate.'
'What do you anticipate of me?'
'For a little while you will perhaps be as you are now,- a very little while; and then you will turn cool; and then you will be capricious; and then you will be stern, and I shall have much ado to please you: but when you get well used to me, you will perhaps like me again,- like me, I say, not love me. I suppose your love will effervesce in six months, or less. I have observed in books written by men, that period assigned as the farthest to which a husband's ardour extends. Yet, after all, as a friend and companion, I hope never to become quite distasteful to my dear master.'
'Distasteful! and like you again! I think I shall like you again, and yet again: and I will make you confess I do not only like, but love you- with truth, fervour, constancy.'
'Yet are you not capricious, sir?'
'To women who please me only by their faces, I am the very devil when I find out they have neither souls nor hearts- when they open to me a perspective of flatness, triviality, and perhaps imbecility, coarseness, and ill-temper: but to the clear eye and eloquent tongue, to the soul made of fire, and the character that bends but does not break- at once supple and stable, tractable and consistent- I am ever tender and true.'
'Had you ever experience of such a character, sir? Did you eve
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