I have now been married ten years.  I know what it is to live entirely for and with what I love best on earth.  I hold myself supremely blest —­ blest beyond what language can express; because I am my husband’s life as fully is he is mine.  No woman was ever nearer to her mate than I am:  ever more absolutely bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh.  I know no weariness of my Edward’s society:  he knows none of mine, any more than we each do of the pulsation of the heart that beats in our separate bosoms; consequently, we are ever together.  To be together is for us to be at once as free as in solitude, as gay as in company.  We talk, I believe, all day long:  to talk to each other is but a more animated and an audible thinking.  All my confidence is bestowed on him, all his confidence is devoted to me; we are precisely suited in character —­ perfect concord is the result.

Mr. Rochester continued blind the first two years of our union; perhaps it was that circumstance that drew us so very near —­ that knit us so very close:  for I was then his vision, as I am still his right hand.  Literally, I was (what he often called me) the apple of his eye.  He saw nature —­ he saw books through me; and never did I weary of gazing for his behalf, and of putting into words the effect of field, tree, town, river, cloud, sunbeam —­ of the landscape before us; of the weather round us —­ and impressing by sound on his ear what light could no longer stamp on his eye.  Never did I weary of reading to him; never did I weary of conducting him where he wished to go:  of doing for him what he wished to be done.  And there was a pleasure in my services, most full, most exquisite, even though sad —­ because he claimed these services without painful shame or damping humiliation.  He loved me so truly, that he knew no reluctance in profiting by my attendance:  he felt I loved him so fondly, that to yield that attendance was to indulge my sweetest wishes.

One morning at the end of the two years, as I was writing a letter to his dictation, he came and bent over me, and said —­ “Jane, have you a glittering ornament round your neck?”

I had a gold watch-chain:  I answered “Yes.”

“And have you a pale blue dress on?”

I had.  He informed me then, that for some time he had fancied the obscurity clouding one eye was becoming less dense; and that now he was sure of it.

He and I went up to London.  He had the advice of an eminent oculist; and he eventually recovered the sight of that one eye.  He cannot now see very distinctly:  he cannot read or write much; but he can find his way without being led by the hand:  the sky is no longer a blank to him —­ the earth no longer a void.  When his first-born was put into his arms, he could see that the boy had inherited his own eyes, as they once were —­ large, brilliant, and black.  On that occasion, he again, with a full heart, acknowledged that God had tempered judgment with mercy.