CHAPTER XV 179 freezing and sunless air , he went on -
" I liked bonbons too in those days , Miss Eyre , and I was croquant -- ( overlook the barbarism ) -- croquant chocolate comfits , and smoking alternately , watching meantime the equipages that rolled along the fashionable streets towards the neighbouring opera-house , when in an elegant close carriage drawn by a beautiful pair of English horses , and distinctly seen in the brilliant city-night , I recognised the ' voiture ' I had given Celine . She was returning : of course my heart thumped with impatience against the iron rails I leant upon . The carriage stopped , as I had expected , at the hotel door ; my flame ( that is the very word for an opera inamorata ) alighted : though muffed in a cloak -- an unnecessary encumbrance , by-the-bye , on so warm a June evening -- I knew her instantly by her little foot , seen peeping from the skirt of her dress , as she skipped from the carriage-step . Bending over the balcony , I was about to murmur ' Mon ange ' -- in a tone , of course , which should be audible to the ear of love alone -- when a figure jumped from the carriage after her ; cloaked also ; but that was a spurred heel which had rung on the pavement , and that was a hatted head which now passed under the arched porte cochere of the hotel .
" You never felt jealousy , did you , Miss Eyre ? Of course not : I need not ask you ; because you never felt love . You have both sentiments yet to experience : your soul sleeps ; the shock is yet to be given which shall waken it . You think all existence lapses in as quiet a flow as that in which your youth has hitherto slid away . Floating on with closed eyes and muffled ears , you neither see the rocks bristling not far off in the bed of the flood , nor hear the breakers boil at their base . But I tell you -- and you may mark my words -- you will come some day to a craggy pass in the channel , where the whole of life ' s stream will be broken up into whirl and tumult , foam and noise : either you will be dashed to atoms on crag points , or lifted up and borne on by some master-wave into a calmer current -- as I am now .
" I like this day ; I like that sky of steel ; I like the sternness and stillness of the world under this frost . I like Thornfield , its antiquity , its retirement , its old crow-trees and thorn-trees , its grey facade , and lines of dark windows