Villette

a little — a very little — shaken in nerves. I grant I was not looking well, but, on the contrary, thin, hagg

, I heard long afterwards, turned out a thorough miser: a direct contrast to his generous kinswoman, and a foil to her memory, blessed to this day by the poor and needy. The possessor, then, of fifteen pounds; of health, though worn, not broken, and of a spirit in similar condition; I might still; in comp

erty, and my perplexity, my heart, nourished and nerved with the vigour of a youth that had not yet counted twenty-three summers, beat light and not feebly. Not feebly, I am sure, or I should have trembled in that lonely walk, which lay through still fields, and passed neither village nor farmhouse, nor cottage: I should have quailed in the absence of moonlight, for it was by the leading of stars only I t

s,” it was said to me

” was t

that flat, rich middle of England — I mentally saw within reach

and asking once more to see the house

of my senses; and, indeed, I had a staid manner of my own which ere now had been as good to me as cloak and hood of hodden grey, since under its favour I had been enabl

past the window and came bounding into the room. It was a pretty child, and as it danced, laughing, up to me — for we wer

een schoolfellows, when I was a girl of ten and she a young lady of sixteen

her memory; why should I? She came for her son to accompany her in a walk, and behind her followed a nurse, carrying an infant. I only mention the incident because, in addressing the nurse, Mrs. Leigh spoke French (very bad French, by the way, and with an incorrigibly bad accent, again forcibly reminding me of our school-days): and I found the woman was a foreigner. The little boy chattered volubly in French too. When t

for which their prescient minds anticipate a possible use some day. Before I left my old friend, she gave me the

keep me a few days, and also to bring me back if I found no inducement to stay. I regarded it as a brief holiday, permitted for once to work-weary faculties, rather than as an advent

ll a late period, withstood the frosts of time, lies now, at last white, under a white c

r mood to cherish such; arriving as I did late, on a dark, raw, and rainy evening, in a Babylon and a wilderness, of which the vastness and the strangeness t

ed to understand and to be understood, so far as to get myself and trunk safely conveyed to the old inn whereof I had the address. How difficult, how oppressive, how puzzling seemed my flight! In London for

ity that she spasmodically executed her trust. Thus urged, she paid the porter: considering the crisis, I did not blame her too much that she was hugely cheated; she asked the waiter for a

her dress — I wondered how they had all been manufactured. Her speech had an accent which in its mincing gli

t, “and then the scene is new, and t

-looking, black-coated, white-neckclothed waiter, I got civility from them ere long. I believe at first they thought I was

ms on the pillow, a terrible oppression overcame me. All at once my position rose on me like a ghost. Anomalous, desolate, almost blank of hope it stood. What was I doing her

hat I could go forward — that a way, however narrow and difficult, would in time open — predominated over other feelings: its influence hushed them so far, that at last I became sufficiently tranquil to be able to say my prayers and seek my couch. I had just e