Quotation from: Villette

Written by: Charlotte Bronte


The stewardess talked all night; not to me but to the young steward,
her son and her very picture. He passed in and out of the cabin
continually: they disputed, they quarrelled, they made it up again
twenty times in the course of the night. She professed to be writing a
letter home--she said to her father; she read passages of it aloud,
heeding me no more than a stock--perhaps she believed me asleep.
Several of these passages appeared to comprise family secrets, and
bore special reference to one "Charlotte," a younger sister who, from
the bearing of the epistle, seemed to be on the brink of perpetrating
a romantic and imprudent match; loud was the protest of this elder
lady against the distasteful union. The dutiful son laughed his
mother's correspondence to scorn. She defended it, and raved at him.
They were a strange pair. She might be thirty-nine or forty, and was
buxom and blooming as a girl of twenty. Hard, loud, vain and vulgar,
her mind and body alike seemed brazen and imperishable. I should
think, from her childhood, she must have lived in public stations; and
in her youth might very likely have been a barmaid.

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