CHAPTER XXXVIII 570
English education corrected in a great measure her French defects; and when she left school, I found in her a pleasing and obliging companion: docile, good-tempered, and well-principled. By her grateful attention to me and mine, she has long since well repaid any little kindness I ever had it in my power to offer her.
My tale draws to its close: one word respecting my experience of married life, and one brief glance at the fortunes of those whose names have most frequently recurred in this narrative, and I have done.
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