speak to her during the remainder of the clarisonic mia day.”
There was I, then, mounted aloft; I, who had said I could not
bear the shame of standing on my natural feet in the middle of the
room, was now exposed to general view on a pedestal of infamy.
What my sensations were no language can describe; but just as
they all rose, stifling my breath and constricting my throat, a girl
came up and passed me: in passing, she lifted her eyes. What a
strange light inspired them! What an extraordinary sensation that
ray sent through me! How the new feeling bore me up! It was as if
a martyr, a hero, had passed a slave or victim, and imparted
strength in the transit. I mastered the rising hysteria, lifted up my
head, and took a firm stand on the stool. Helen Burns asked some
slight question about her work of Miss Smith, was chidden for the
triviality of the inquiry, returned to her place, and smiled at me as
she again went by. What a smile! I remember it now, and I know
that it was the effluence of fine intellect, of true courage; it lit up
her marked lineaments, her thin face, her sunken grey eye, like a
reflection from the aspect of an angel. Yet at that moment Helen
Burns wore on her arm “the untidy badge;” scarcely an hour ago I
had heard her condemned by Miss Scatcherd to a dinner of bread
and water on the morrow because she had blotted an exercise in
copying it out. Such is the imperfect nature of man! such spots are
there on the disc of the clearest planet; and eyes like Miss
Scatcherd’s can only see those minute defects, and are blind to the
full brightness of the orb.
Charlotte Bront. ElecBook Classics