Quotation from: The Professor

Written by: Charlotte Bronte


Something stirred in an adjoining chamber; it would not do to be
surprised eaves-dropping; I tapped hastily, And as hastily
entered. Frances was just before me; she had been walking slowly
in her room, and her step was checked by my advent: Twilight
only was with her, and tranquil, ruddy Firelight; to these
sisters, the Bright and the Dark, she had been speaking, ere I
entered, in poetry. Sir Walter Scott's voice, to her a foreign,
far-off sound, a mountain echo, had uttered itself in the first
stanzas; the second, I thought, from the style and the substance,
was the language of her own heart. Her face was grave, its
expression concentrated; she bent on me an unsmiling eye--an eye
just returning from abstraction, just awaking from dreams:
well-arranged was her simple attire, smooth her dark hair,
orderly her tranquil room; but what--with her thoughtful look,
her serious self-reliance, her bent to meditation and haply
inspiration--what had she to do with love? "Nothing," was the
answer of her own sad, though gentle countenance; it seemed to
say, "I must cultivate fortitude and cling to poetry; one is to
be my support and the other my solace through life. Human
affections do not bloom, nor do human passions glow for me."
Other women have such thoughts. Frances, had she been as
desolate as she deemed, would not have been worse off than
thousands of her sex. Look at the rigid and formal race of old
maids--the race whom all despise; they have fed themselves, from
youth upwards, on maxims of resignation and endurance. Many of
them get ossified with the dry diet; self-control is so
continually their thought, so perpetually their object, that at
last it absorbs the softer and more agreeable qualities of their
nature; and they die mere models of austerity, fashioned out of a
little parchment and much bone. Anatomists will tell you that
there is a heart in the withered old maid's carcase--the same as
in that of any cherished wife or proud mother in the land. Can
this be so? I really don't know; but feel inclined to doubt it.

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