“I tired of the routine of eight years in one afternoon.”

“You have been resident in my house three months?""Yes, sir.""And you came from--?""From Lowood school, in -shire.""Ah! a charitable concern. How long were you there?""Eight years.""Eight years! you must be tenacious of life.”

“Eight years! you must be tenacious of life. I thought half the time in such a place would have done up any constitution! No wonder you have rather the look of another world. I marvelled where you had got that sort of face. When you came on me in Hay Lane last night, I thought unaccountably of fairy tales, and had half a mind to demand whether you had bewitched my horse: I am not sure yet.”

“She did not exist: she would not be born till tomorrow, some time after eight o'clock a.m.; and I would wait to be assured she had come into the world alive before I assigned to her all that property.”

“I was glad of it: I never liked long walks, especially on chilly afternoons: dreadful to me was the coming home in the raw twilight, with nipped fingers and toes, and a heart saddened by the chidings of Bessie, the nurse, and humbled by the consciousness of my physical inferiority to Eliza, John, and Georgiana Reed.”

“One morning at the end of the two years, as I was writing a letter to his dictation, he came and bent over me, and said--"Jane, have you a glittering ornament round your neck?" I had a gold watch-chain: I answered "Yes." "And have you a pale blue dress on?I had. He informed me then, that for some time he had fancied the obscurity clouding one eye was becoming less dense; and that now he was sure of it.”

“I could not answer the ceaseless inward question-why I thus suffered; now, at the distance of-I will not say how many years, I see it clearly.”