There was nothing to cool or banish love in these circumstances, though much to create despair.  Much too, you will think, reader, to engender jealousy:  if a woman, in my position, could presume to be jealous of a woman in Miss Ingram’s.  But I was not jealous:  or very rarely; —­ the nature of the pain I suffered could not be explained by that word.  Miss Ingram was a mark beneath jealousy:  she was too inferior to excite the feeling.  Pardon the seeming paradox; I mean what I say.  She was very showy, but she was not genuine:  she had a fine person, many brilliant attainments; but her mind was poor, her heart barren by nature:  nothing bloomed spontaneously on that soil; no unforced natural fruit delighted by its freshness.  She was not good; she was not original:  she used to repeat sounding phrases from books:  she never offered, nor had, an opinion of her own.  She advocated a high tone of sentiment; but she did not know the sensations of sympathy and pity; tenderness and truth were not in her.  Too often she betrayed this, by the undue vent she gave to a spiteful antipathy she had conceived against little Adele:  pushing her away with some contumelious epithet if she happened to approach her; sometimes ordering her from the room, and always treating her with coldness and acrimony.  Other eyes besides mine watched these manifestations of character —­ watched them closely, keenly, shrewdly.  Yes; the future bridegroom, Mr. Rochester himself, exercised over his intended a ceaseless surveillance; and it was from this sagacity —­ this guardedness of his —­ this perfect, clear consciousness of his fair one’s defects —­ this obvious absence of passion in his sentiments towards her, that my ever-torturing pain arose.

I saw he was going to marry her, for family, perhaps political reasons, because her rank and connections suited him; I felt he had not given her his love, and that her qualifications were ill adapted to win from him that treasure.  This was the point —­ this was where the nerve was touched and teased —­ this was where the fever was sustained and fed:  She could not charm him.

If she had managed the victory at once, and he had yielded and sincerely laid his heart at her feet, I should have covered my face, turned to the wall, and (figuratively) have died to them.  If Miss Ingram had been a good and noble woman, endowed with force, fervour, kindness, sense, I should have had one vital struggle with two tigers —­ jealousy and despair:  then, my heart torn out and devoured, I should have admired her —­ acknowledged her excellence, and been quiet for the rest of my days:  and the more absolute her superiority, the deeper would have been my admiration —­ the more truly tranquil my quiescence.  But as matters really stood, to watch Miss Ingram’s efforts at fascinating Mr. Rochester, to witness their repeated failure —­ herself unconscious that they did fail; vainly fancying that each shaft launched hit the mark, and infatuatedly pluming herself on success, when her pride and self-complacency repelled further and further what she wished to allure —­ to witness this, was to be at once under ceaseless excitation and ruthless restraint.