“You have rather the look of another world. I marvelled where you had got that sort of face.”

“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.”

“I grieve to leave Thornfield: I love Thornfield - I love it, because I have lived in it a full and delightful life, -momentarily at least. I have not been trampled on. I have not been petrified. I have not been buried with inferior minds, and excluded from every glimpse of communion with what is bright and energetic, and high. I have talked, face to face, with what I reverence; with what I delight in, -with an original, a vigorous, an expanded mind. I have known you, Mr. Rochester; and it strikes me with terror and anguish to feel I absolutely must be torn from you for ever. I see the necessity of departure; and it is like looking on the necessity of death.”

“When do you wish to go?”“Early to-morrow morning, sir.”“Well, you must have some money; you can’t travel without money, and I daresay you have not much: I have given you no salary yet. How much have you in the world, Jane?” he asked, smiling.I drew out my purse; a meagre thing it was. “Five shillings, sir.” He took the purse, poured the hoard into his palm, and chuckled over it as if its scantiness amused him. Soon he produced his pocket-book: “Here,” said he, offering me a note; it was fifty pounds, and he owed me but fifteen. I told him I had no change.“I don’t want change; you know that. Take your wages.”I declined accepting more than was my due. He scowled at first; then, as if recollecting something, he said—“Right, right! Better not give you all now: you would, perhaps, stay away three months if you had fifty pounds. There are ten; is it not plenty?”“Yes, sir, but now you owe me five.”“Come back for it, then; I am your banker for forty pounds.”“Mr. Rochester, I may as well mention another matter of business to you while I have the opportunity.”“Matter of business? I am curious to hear it.”“You have as good as informed me, sir, that you are going shortly to be married?”“Yes; what then?”“In that case, sir, Adèle ought to go to school: I am sure you will perceive the necessity of it.”“To get her out of my bride’s way, who might otherwise walk over her rather too emphatically? There’s sense in the suggestion; not a doubt of it. Adèle, as you say, must go to school; and you, of course, must march straight to—the devil?”“I hope not, sir; but I must seek another situation somewhere.”“In course!” he exclaimed, with a twang of voice and a distortion of features equally fantastic and ludicrous. He looked at me some minutes.“And old Madam Reed, or the Misses, her daughters, will be solicited by you to seek a place, I suppose?”“No, sir; I am not on such terms with my relatives as would justify me in asking favours of them—but I shall advertise.”

“Men, in general, are a sort of scum, very different to anything of which you have an idea.”

“Sometimes I have the strangest feeling about you. Especially when you are near me as you are now. It feels as though I had a string tied here under my left rib where my heart is, tightly knotted to you in a similar fashion. And when you go to Ireland, with all that distance between us, I am afraid that this cord will be snapped, and I shall bleed inwardly.”

“You both think I know not what,' said I. 'Have the goodness to make me as little the subject of your mutual talk and thoughts as possible. I have my own sort of life apart from yours.”