_You_ would have made a new ideal of St. John Rivers, who was
infinitely the best material of the two, and possibly gone on to your
dying day in the belief that his cold and hard soul was only the adamant
of the seraph, encouraged in that belief by his real and high principle,--
a thing that went for sounding brass with that worldly-wise little
philosopher, Jane, because it did not act more practically on his inborn
traits."
"Bah!" said Josephine, "when did you turn gypsy, Sally? You ought to sell
_dukkeripen_, and make your fortune. Why don't you unfold Letty's fate?"
"No," said I, laughing. "Don't you know that the afflatus always exhausts
the priestess? You may tell Letty's fortune, or mine, if you will; but my
power is gone."
"I can tell yours easily, O Sibyl!" replied she. "You will never marry,
neither for real nor ideal. You should have fallen in love in the orthodox
way, when you were seventeen. You are adaptive enough to have moulded
yourself into any nature that you loved, and constant enough to have clung
to it through good and evil. You would have been a model wife, and a
blessed mother. But now--you are too old, my dear; you have seen too
much; you have not hardened yourself, but you have learned to see too
keenly into other people. You don't respect men, 'except exceptions'; and
you have seen so much matrimony that is harsh and unlovable, that you
dread it; and yet--Don't look at me that way, Sarah! I shall cry!--My
dear! my darling! I did not mean to hurt you.
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