Quotation from: Villette

Written by: Charlotte Bronte


A warm hand, taking my cold fingers, led me down to a room where there
was a fire. Dr. John and I sat before the stove. He talked to me and
soothed me with unutterable goodness, promising me twenty letters for
the one lost. If there are words and wrongs like knives, whose deep-
inflicted lacerations never heal--cutting injuries and insults of
serrated and poison-dripping edge--so, too, there are consolations of
tone too fine for the ear not fondly and for ever to retain their
echo: caressing kindnesses--loved, lingered over through a whole life,
recalled with unfaded tenderness, and answering the call with undimmed
shine, out of that raven cloud foreshadowing Death himself. I have
been told since that Dr. Bretton was not nearly so perfect as I
thought him: that his actual character lacked the depth, height,
compass, and endurance it possessed in my creed. I don't know: he was
as good to me as the well is to the parched wayfarer--as the sun to
the shivering jailbird. I remember him heroic. Heroic at this moment
will I hold him to be.

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Old Dominion University CS Dept
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Part of a series of experiments in web preservation under the direction of Michael L. Nelson, Ph.D.