Quotation from: Villette

Written by: Charlotte Bronte


I was confounded, as the reader may suppose, yet not with an
irrecoverable confusion; being conscious that it was from no emotion
of incautious admiration, nor yet in a spirit of unjustifiable
inquisitiveness, that I had incurred this reproof. I might have
cleared myself on the spot, but would not. I did not speak. I was not
in the habit of speaking to him. Suffering him, then, to think what he
chose and accuse me of what he would, I resumed some work I had
dropped, and kept my head bent over it during the remainder of his
stay. There is a perverse mood of the mind which is rather soothed
than irritated by misconstruction; and in quarters where we can never
be rightly known, we take pleasure, I think, in being consummately
ignored. What honest man, on being casually taken for a housebreaker,
does not feel rather tickled than vexed at the mistake?

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