CHAPTER IV 44
and this book about the liar, you may give to your girl, Georgiana, for it is she who tells lies, and not I."
Mrs. Reed ' s hands still lay on her work inactive: her eye of ice continued to dwell freezingly on mine.
" What more have you to say?" she asked, rather in the tone in which a person might address an opponent of adult age than such as is ordinarily used to a child.
That eye of hers, that voice stirred every antipathy I had. Shaking from head to foot, thrilled with ungovernable excitement, I continued-
" I am glad you are no relation of mine: I will never call you aunt again as long as I live. I will never come to see you when I am grown up; and if any one asks me how I liked you, and how you treated me, I will say the very thought of you makes me sick, and that you treated me with miserable cruelty."
" How dare you affirm that, Jane Eyre?"
" How dare I, Mrs. Reed? How dare I? Because it is the TRUTH. You think I have no feelings, and that I can do without one bit of love or kindness; but I cannot live so: and you have no pity. I shall remember how you thrust me back-- roughly and violently thrust me back-- into the red-room, and locked me up there, to my dying day; though I was in agony; though I cried out, while suffocating with distress, ' Have mercy! Have mercy, Aunt Reed!' And that punishment you made me suffer because your wicked boy struck me-- knocked me down for nothing. I will tell anybody who asks me questions, this exact tale. People think you a good woman, but you are bad, hard- hearted. YOU are deceitful!"
Ere I had finished this reply, my soul began to expand, to exult, with the strangest sense of freedom, of triumph, I ever felt. It seemed as if an invisible bond had burst, and that I had struggled out into unhoped-for liberty. Not without cause was this sentiment: Mrs. Reed looked frightened;