The Woman in White quotes

This is the story of what a woman’s patience can endure, and what a Man’s resolution can achieve.

If the machinery of the Law could be depended on to fathom every case of suspicion, and to conduct every process of inquiry, with moderate assistance only from the lubricating influences of oil of gold, the events which fill these pages might have claimed their …

With the partial recovery of his animation came the return of his wonderful delusion on the subject of swimming.

As soon as his chattering teeth would let him speak, he smiled vacantly, and said he thought it must have been the Cramp.

When he had thoroughly recovered himself, and had joined me on the beach, his warm Southern nature broke through all artificial English restraints in a moment.

No house was near; no one was passing whom I could consult; and no earthly right existed on my part to give me a power of control over her, even if I had known how to exercise it.

I trace these lines, self-distrustfully, with the shadows of after-events darkening the very paper I write on; and still I say, what could I do?

What I did do, was to try and gain time by questioning her. “Are you sure that your friend in London will receive you at such a late hour as this?” I said.

As she repeated the words for the third time, she came close to me and laid her hand, with a sudden gentle stealthiness, on my bosom—a thin hand; a cold hand (when I removed it with mine) even on that sultry night.

Remember that I was young; remember that the hand which touched me was a woman’s.

One word! The little familiar word that is on everybody’s lips, every hour in the day. Oh me! and I tremble, now, when I write it.

a cold hand (when I removed it with mine) even on that sultry night. Remember that I was young; remember that the hand which touched me was a woman’s.

One word! The little familiar word that is on everybody’s lips, every hour in the day. Oh me! and I tremble, now, when I write it.

We set our faces towards London, and walked on together in the first still hour of the new day—I, and this woman, whose name, whose character, whose story, whose objects in life, whose very presence by my side, at that moment, were fathomless mysteries to …

and, what is still more trying, you will be thrown entirely upon our society. Mrs. Vesey is an excellent person, who possesses all the cardinal virtues, and counts for nothing; and Mr. Fairlie is too great an invalid to be a companion for anybody.

I don’t know what is the matter with him, and the doctors don’t know what is the matter with him, and he doesn’t know himself what is the matter with him.

We all say it’s on the nerves, and we none of us know what we mean when we say it. However, I advise you to humour his little peculiarities, when you see him today.

and Mr. Fairlie is too great an invalid to be a companion for anybody. I don’t know what is the matter with him, and the doctors don’t know what is the matter with him, and he doesn’t know himself what is the matter with him.

We all say it’s on the nerves, and we none of us know what we mean when we say it.

However, I advise you to humour his little peculiarities, when you see him today. Admire his collection of coins, prints, and watercolour drawings, and you will win his heart.

Halcombe, my father; the second time to Mr. Fairlie, my half-sister’s father. Except that we are both orphans, we are in every respect as unlike each other as possible. My father was a poor man, and Miss Fairlie’s father was a rich man.

I have got nothing, and she has a fortune. I am dark and ugly, and she is fair and pretty.

Everybody thinks me crabbed and odd (with perfect justice); and everybody thinks her sweet-tempered and charming (with more justice still). In short, she is an angel; and I am—Try some of that marmalade, Mr.

My father was a poor man, and Miss Fairlie’s father was a rich man. I have got nothing, and she has a fortune. I am dark and ugly, and she is fair and pretty.

Everybody thinks me crabbed and odd (with perfect justice); and everybody thinks her sweet-tempered and charming (with more justice still).

In short, she is an angel; and I am—Try some of that marmalade, Mr. Hartright, and finish the sentence, in the name of female propriety, for yourself. What am I to tell you about Mr. Fairlie? Upon my honour, I hardly know.

There are no children, thank Heaven, in the house; but the servants (persons born without nerves) will encourage the children from the village. Such brats—oh, dear me, such brats! Shall I confess it, Mr. Hartright?—I sadly want a reform in the construction of children.

Nature’s only idea seems to be to make them machines for the production of incessant noise.

Surely our delightful Raffaello’s conception is infinitely preferable?”

When the sea-green curtains were closed, and when the two baize doors were shut behind me, I stopped for a moment in the little circular hall beyond, and drew a long, luxurious breath of relief.

It was like coming to the surface of the water after deep diving, to find myself once more on the outside of Mr. Fairlie’s room.

As soon as I was comfortably established for the morning in my pretty little studio, the first resolution at which I arrived was to turn my steps no more in the direction of the apartments occupied by the master of the house, except in the …

… she talked of anything, before she answered Yes, or No, to the commonest question—always with the same serene smile on her lips, the same vacantly-attentive turn of the head, the same snugly-comfortable position of her hands and arms, under every possible change of domestic circumstances.

A mild, a compliant, an unutterably tranquil and harmless old lady, who never by any chance suggested the idea that she had been actually alive since the hour of her birth.

Nature has so much to do in this world, and is engaged in generating such a vast variety of coexistent productions, that she must surely be now and then too flurried and confused to distinguish between the different processes that she is carrying on at …

Mrs. Vesey looked the personification of human composure and female amiability. A calm enjoyment of a calm existence beamed in drowsy smiles on her plump, placid face.

Some of us rush through life, and some of us saunter through life. Mrs. Vesey sat through life.

Sat in the house, early and late; sat in the garden; sat in unexpected window-seats in passages; sat (on a campstool) when her friends tried to take her out walking;

all, perhaps, that even the deeper reach of thought and pen can say in their language, either.

The woman who first gives life, light, and form to our shadowy conceptions of beauty, fills a void in our spiritual nature that has remained unknown to us till she appeared.

Sympathies that lie too deep for words, too deep almost for thoughts, are touched, at such times, by other charms than those which the senses feel and which the resources of expression can realise.

“Because I shall believe all that you say to me,” she answered simply.

In those few words she unconsciously gave me the key to her whole character: to that generous trust in others which, in her nature, grew innocently out of the sense of her own truth.

I only knew it intuitively then. I know it by experience now.

There is surely a reason for this want of inborn sympathy between the creature and the creation around it, a reason which may perhaps be found in the widely-differing destinies of man and his earthly sphere.

The grandest mountain prospect that the eye can range over is appointed to annihilation. The smallest human interest that the pure heart can feel is appointed to immortality.

We had been out nearly three hours, when the carriage again passed through the gates of Limmeridge House.

At any time, and under any circumstances of human interest, is it not strange to see how little real hold the objects of the natural world amid which we live can gain on our hearts and minds?

We go to Nature for comfort in trouble, and sympathy in joy, only in books.

Admiration of those beauties of the inanimate world, which modern poetry so largely and so eloquently describes, is not, even in the best of us, one of the original instincts of our nature. As children, we none of us possess it.

The poor weak words, which have failed to describe Miss Fairlie, have succeeded in betraying the sensations she awakened in me. It is so with us all.

Our words are giants when they do us an injury, and dwarfs when they do us a service.

Ah! how well I know all the sadness and all the mockery that is contained in those three words. I can sigh over my mournful confession with the tenderest woman who reads it and pities me.

Let it be enough to say that the time when she first surprised my secret was, I firmly believe, the time when she first surprised her own, and the time, also, when she changed towards me in the interval of one night.

Her nature, too truthful to deceive others, was too noble to deceive itself.

When the doubt that I had hushed asleep first laid its weary weight on her heart, the true face owned all, and said, in its own frank, simple language—I am sorry for him; I am sorry for myself.

I opened the door for her in silence, and followed her out.

She had not convinced me. If the recording angel had come down from heaven to confirm her, and had opened his book to my mortal eyes, the recording angel would not have convinced me.

We found the gardener at work as usual. No amount of questioning could extract a single answer of any importance from the lad’s impenetrable stupidity. The woman who had given him the letter was an elderly woman;

Fairlie’s “kind compliments,” “best thanks,” and “sincere regrets” that the state of his health still obliged him to remain a solitary prisoner in his own room. A more satisfactory arrangement to both sides could not possibly have been adopted.

It would be hard to say which of us, under the circumstances, felt the most grateful sense of obligation to Mr. Fairlie’s accommodating nerves.

I sat down at once to write the letter, expressing myself in it as civilly, as clearly, and as briefly as possible. Mr. Fairlie did not hurry his reply. Nearly an hour elapsed before the answer was placed in my hands.

Perfect repose of body and mind being to the last degree important in his case, Mr. Fairlie will not suffer Mr. Hartright to disturb that repose by remaining in the house under circumstances of an essentially irritating nature to both sides.

Accordingly, Mr. Fairlie waives his right of refusal, purely with a view to the preservation of his own tranquillity⁠—and informs Mr. Hartright that he may go.

”

“

Sir Percival Glyde shall remove that doubt, Mr. Hartright⁠—or Laura Fairlie shall never be his wife.

”

… she talked to me about myself and my home, while she asked me a woman’s minutely observant questions about my mother and my sister, and innocently wondered whether I should ever leave my lonely chambers and have a wife and a house of my own?

Wind and wave had long since smoothed out the trace of her which she had left in those marks on the sand.

I looked over the wide monotony of the seaside prospect, and the place in which we two had idled away the sunny hours was as lost to me as if I had never known it, as strange to me as if I stood already on …

The blinding tears shut her out from my eyes, and I dashed them away to look at her for the last time. One look as she sank into a chair, as her arms fell on the table, as her fair head dropped on them wearily.

One farewell look, and the door had closed upon her⁠—the great gulf of separation had opened between us⁠—the image of Laura Fairlie was a memory of the past already.

I had been favourably impressed by Mr. Hartright on our first introduction to one another, but I soon discovered that he was not free from the social failings incidental to his age.

There are three things that none of the young men of the present generation can do. They can’t sit over their wine, they can’t play at whist, and they can’t pay a lady a compliment.

Mr. Hartright was no exception to the general rule. Otherwise, even in those early days and on that short acquaintance, he struck me as being a modest and gentlemanlike young man.

I was the first to speak in answer to this appeal. My own course was plain to me.

It is the great beauty of the Law that it can dispute any human statement, made under any circumstances, and reduced to any form.

If I had felt professionally called upon to set up a case against Sir Percival Glyde, on the strength of his own explanation, I could have done so beyond all doubt.

I could see no cause for any uneasiness or any doubt, but she had made me a little uneasy, and a little doubtful, nevertheless.

In my youth, I should have chafed and fretted under the irritation of my own unreasonable state of mind. In my age, I knew better, and went out philosophically to walk it off.

I liked to feel her hearty indignation flash out on me in that way.

We see so much malice and so little indignation in my profession.

“In that case,” I said, “excuse me if I tell you, in our legal phrase, that you are travelling out of the record.

With those words she suddenly rose and left me.

When a sensible woman has a serious question put to her, and evades it by a flippant answer, it is a sure sign, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, that she has something to conceal.

I returned to the perusal of the newspaper, strongly suspecting that Miss Halcombe and Miss Fairlie had a secret between them which they were keeping from Sir Percival, and keeping from me. I thought this hard on both of us, especially on Sir Percival.

She only answered by putting up her cheek to me to be kissed.

Even lawyers have hearts, and mine ached a little as I took leave of her.

The whole interview between us had hardly lasted more than half an hour—she had not breathed a word, in my presence, to explain the mystery of her evident distress and dismay at the prospect of her marriage, and yet she had contrived to win me …

“You are altering your opinion about Laura,” she said. “You are readier to make allowances for her than you were yesterday.”

No sensible man ever engages, unprepared, in a fencing match of words with a woman.

I only answered—

A really irresistible man—courteous, considerate, delightfully free from pride—a gentleman, every inch of him.

As I drove away to the station I felt as if I could cheerfully do anything to promote the interests of Sir Percival Glyde⁠—anything in the world, except drawing the marriage settlement of his wife.

I threw the letter away in disgust. Just as it had fluttered to the ground, there was a knock at my door, and Sir Percival’s solicitor, Mr. Merriman, was shown in.

There are many varieties of sharp practitioners in this world, but I think the hardest of all to deal with are the men who overreach you under the disguise of inveterate good-humour.

A fat, well fed, smiling, friendly man of business is of all parties to a bargain the most hopeless to deal with. Mr. Merriman was one of this class.

“The least we will take,” said Mr. Merriman, “is nineteen-thousand-nine-hundred-and-ninety-nine-pounds-nineteen-shillings-and-elevenpence-three-farthings. Ha! ha! ha! Excuse me, Mr. Gilmore. I must have my little joke.”

“Little enough,” I remarked. “The joke is just worth the odd farthing it was made for.”

Mr. Merriman was delighted. He laughed over my retort till the room rang again. I was not half so good-humoured on my side; I came back to business, and closed the interview.

“Man?” he repeated. “You provoking old Gilmore, what can you possibly mean by calling him a man? He’s nothing of the sort.

He might have been a man half an hour ago, before I wanted my etchings, and he may be a man half an hour hence, when I don’t want them any longer. At present he is simply a portfolio stand.

Why object, Gilmore, to a portfolio stand?”

“Don’t bully me!” exclaimed Mr. Fairlie, falling back helplessly in the chair, and closing his eyes. “

Please don’t bully me. I’m not strong enough.

”

“No,” she said simply. “

Courage, dear, to tell the truth.

”

She put her lips to mine, and kissed me. “My own love,” she said softly, “you are so much too fond of me, and so much too proud of me, that you forget, in my case, what you would remember in your own.

Better that Sir Percival should doubt my motives, and misjudge my conduct if he will, than that I should be first false to him in thought, and then mean enough to serve my own interests by hiding the falsehood.

”

I looked at her, and listened to her in silent surprise.

Through all the years of our close intimacy this passive force in her character had been hidden from me⁠—hidden even from herself, till love found it, and suffering called it forth.

As the clock on the mantelpiece struck eleven Sir Percival knocked at the door and came in. There was suppressed anxiety and agitation in every line of his face.

She started violently, and a faint cry of surprise escaped her. Every word she had spoken had innocently betrayed her purity and truth to a man who thoroughly understood the priceless value of a pure and true woman.

Her own noble conduct had been the hidden enemy, throughout, of all the hopes she had trusted to it.

I had dreaded this from the first. I would have prevented it, if she had allowed me the smallest chance of doing so.

“No!” she said firmly. “

The most wretched of her sex, if she must give herself in marriage when she cannot give her love.

”

If I die first, promise you will give him this little book of his drawings, with my hair in it. There can be no harm, when I am gone, in telling him that I put it there with my own hands.

And say⁠—oh, Marian, say for me, then, what I can never say for myself⁠—say I loved him!

”

I left the room at once after making that declaration. Sir Percival looked seriously embarrassed and distressed, Mr. Fairlie stretched out his lazy legs on his velvet footstool, and said,

“Dear Marian! how I envy you your robust nervous system! Don’t bang the door!”

On going to Laura’s room I found that she had asked for me, and that Mrs. Vesey had informed her that I was with Mr. Fairlie.

“So much the better!” I cried out passionately. “Who cares for his causes of complaint? Are you to break your heart to set his mind at ease?

No man under heaven deserves these sacrifices from us women.

Men! They are the enemies of our innocence and our peace—they drag us away from our parents’ love and our sisters’ friendship—they take us body and soul to themselves, and fasten our helpless lives to theirs as they chain up a dog to his kennel.

As it was, I dashed into Mr. Fairlie’s room—called to him as harshly as possible, “Laura consents to the twenty-second”—and dashed out again without waiting for a word of answer.

I banged the door after me, and I hope I shattered Mr. Fairlie’s nervous system for the rest of the day.

28th.—This morning I read poor Hartright’s farewell letter over again, a doubt having crossed my mind since yesterday, whether I am acting wisely in concealing the fact of his departure from Laura.

But there is danger in my keeping the letter. The merest accident might place it at the mercy of strangers. I may fall ill—I may die. Better to burn it at once, and have one anxiety the less.

It is burnt. The ashes of his farewell letter⁠—the last he may ever write to me⁠—lie in a few black fragments on the hearth.

Is this the sad end to all that sad story? Oh, not the end—surely, surely not the end already!

… that my chance of living with her permanently under her own roof, depended entirely on my not arousing Sir Percival’s jealousy and distrust by standing between them at the beginning of their marriage, in the position of the chosen depositary of his wife’s closest secrets.

Drop by drop I poured the profaning bitterness of this world’s wisdom into that pure heart and that innocent mind, while every higher and better feeling within me recoiled from my miserable task.

It is over now. She has learnt her hard, her inevitable lesson. The simple illusions of her girlhood are gone, and my hand has stripped them off. Better mine than his—that is all my consolation—better mine than his.

All my old feelings of hostility towards him revived on the instant, and all the hours that have passed since have done nothing to dissipate them. I am more unreasonable and more unjust than ever.

In three words⁠—how glibly my pen writes them!⁠—in three words, I hate him.

21st.—Have the anxieties of this anxious time shaken me a little, at last?

For the first time in all the years of our close and happy intercourse we almost avoided looking each other in the face, and we refrained, by common consent, from speaking together in private through the whole evening. I can dwell on it no longer.

Whatever future sorrows may be in store for me, I shall always look back on this twenty-first of December as the most comfortless and most miserable day of my life.

I am writing these lines in the solitude of my own room, long after midnight, having just come back from a stolen look at Laura in her pretty little white bed—the bed she has occupied since the days of her girlhood.

… and hand resting on the white coverlid, so still, so quietly breathing, that the frill on her nightdress never moved—I waited, looking at her, as I have seen her thousands of times, as I shall never see her again—and then stole back to my room.

My own love! with all your wealth, and all your beauty, how friendless you are!

The one man who would give his heart’s life to serve you is far away, tossing, this stormy night, on the awful sea. Who else is left to you?

… I only had the privileges of a man, I would order out Sir Percival’s best horse instantly, and tear away on a night-gallop, eastward, to meet the rising sun—a long, hard, heavy, ceaseless gallop of hours and hours, like the famous highwayman’s ride to York.

Being, however, nothing but a woman, condemned to patience, propriety, and petticoats for life, I must respect the housekeeper’s opinions, and try to compose myself in some feeble and feminine way.

Reading is out of the question—I can’t fix my attention on books. Let me try if I can write myself into sleepiness and fatigue. My journal has been very much neglected of late.

I only see a sad torpor, an unchangeable indifference, when I turn my mind from her in the old character of a sister, and look at her, through the medium of her letters, in the new character of a wife.

In other words, it is always Laura Fairlie who has been writing to me for the last six months, and never Lady Glyde.

The strange silence which she maintains on the subject of her husband’s character and conduct, she preserves with almost equal resolution in the few references which her later letters contain to the name of her husband’s bosom friend, Count Fosco.

I hear the croaking of frogs, faint and far off, and the echoes of the great clock hum in the airless calm long after the strokes have ceased.

I wonder how Blackwater Park will look in the daytime? I don’t altogether like it by night.

12th.—A day of investigations and discoveries—a more interesting day, for many reasons, than I had ventured to anticipate.

I began my sightseeing, of course, with the house.

The main body of the building is of the time of that highly-overrated woman, Queen Elizabeth.

On the ground floor there are two hugely long galleries, with low ceilings lying parallel with each other, and rendered additionally dark and dismal by hideous family portraits—every one of which I should like to burn.

The creature moaned feebly when I looked at it and called to it, but never stirred. I moved away the seat and looked closer. The poor little dog’s eyes were glazing fast, and there were spots of blood on its glossy white side.

The misery of a weak, helpless, dumb creature is surely one of the saddest of all the mournful sights which this world can show.

I lifted the poor dog in my arms as gently as I could, and contrived a sort of makeshift hammock for him to lie in, by gathering up the front of my dress all round him.

But it has certainly had an influence over the first impressions that I have formed of her, now that we are living together again—for which reason only I have thought fit to mention it here.

She has found me unaltered, but I have found her changed.

Changed in person, and in one respect changed in character. I cannot absolutely say that she is less beautiful than she used to be—I can only say that she is less beautiful to me.

But, ah me! where is the faultless human creature who can persevere in a good resolution, without sometimes failing and falling back?

Where is the woman who has ever really torn from her heart the image that has been once fixed in it by a true love?

Books tell us that such unearthly creatures have existed—but what does our own experience say in answer to books?

This in two words:

He looks like a man who could tame anything. If he had married a tigress, instead of a woman, he would have tamed the tigress.

If he had married me, I should have made his cigarettes, as his wife does—I should have held my tongue when he looked at me, as she holds hers.

he presents her with sugarplums in return, which he puts into her mouth playfully, from a box in his pocket.

The rod of iron with which he rules her never appears in company⁠—it is a private rod, and is always kept upstairs.

His method of recommending himself to me is entirely different. He flatters my vanity by talking to me as seriously and sensibly as if I was a man. Yes!

Free, and even rude, as he may occasionally be in his manner towards his fat friend, Sir Percival is nevertheless afraid, as I can plainly see, of giving any serious offence to the Count. I wonder whether I am afraid too?

I certainly never saw a man, in all my experience, whom I should be so sorry to have for an enemy.

Is this because I like him, or because I am afraid of him? Chi sa?—as Count Fosco might say in his own language. Who knows?

“Most true!” he said. “

The fool’s crime is the crime that is found out, and the wise man’s crime is the crime that is not found out.

If I could give you an instance, it would not be the instance of a wise man. Dear Lady Glyde, your sound English common sense has been too much for me. It is checkmate for me this time, Miss Halcombe—ha?”

Ah! I am a bad man, Lady Glyde, am I not?

I say what other people only think, and when all the rest of the world is in a conspiracy to accept the mask for the true face, mine is the rash hand that tears off the plump pasteboard, and shows the bare bones beneath.

I will get up on my big elephant’s legs, before I do myself any more harm in your amiable estimations—I will get up and take a little airy walk of my own.

Is he so very much better in this way than the people whom he condemns in their way?

English Society, Miss Halcombe, is as often the accomplice as it is the enemy of crime.

Yes! yes! Crime is in this country what crime is in other countries—a good friend to a man and to those about him as often as it is an enemy. A great rascal provides for his wife and family.

“

I dare say he did. He was your servant, and was obliged to explain. I am your husband, and am not obliged.

How much longer do you mean to keep me here? I tell you again, there is no time for reading anything—the dogcart is waiting at the door. Once for all, will you sign or will you not?”

If I had been a man, I would have knocked him down on the threshold of his own door, and have left his house, never on any earthly consideration to enter it again.

But I was only a woman⁠—and I loved his wife so dearly!

Thank God, that faithful love helped me, and I sat down again without saying a word. She knew what I had suffered and what I had suppressed. She ran round to me, with the tears streaming from her eyes. “Oh, Marian!” she whispered softly.

“No, not to dislike him.

Dislike is always more or less associated with contempt⁠—I can see nothing in the Count to despise.

”

… so gaily from his lips, and all addressed our various curiosities and various interests so directly and so delicately, that Laura and I listened to him with as much attention and, inconsistent as it may seem, with as much admiration also, as Madame Fosco herself.

Women can resist a man’s love, a man’s fame, a man’s personal appearance, and a man’s money, but they cannot resist a man’s tongue when he knows how to talk to them.

After dinner, while the favourable impression which he had produced on us was still vivid in our minds, the Count modestly withdrew to read in the library.

“That secret is the first I have ever had from you, love, and I am determined it shall be the last. I was silent, as you know, for your sake—and perhaps a little for my own sake as well.

It is very hard for a woman to confess that the man to whom she has given her whole life is the man of all others who cares least for the gift.

If you were married yourself, Marian—and especially if you were happily married—you would feel for me as no single woman can feel, however kind and true she may be.”

“How often,” she went on, “I have heard you laughing over what you used to call your ‘poverty!’ how often you have made me mock-speeches of congratulation on my wealth! Oh, Marian, never laugh again.

Thank God for your poverty⁠—it has made you your own mistress, and has saved you from the lot that has fallen on me.

”

‘Ah, you light-complexioned women are all sulky,’ he said. ‘What do you want? compliments and soft speeches? Well! I’m in a good humour this morning. Consider the compliments paid and the speeches said.’

Men little know when they say hard things to us how well we remember them, and how much harm they do us.

It would have been better for me if I had gone on crying, but his contempt dried up my tears and hardened my heart. From that time, Marian, I never checked myself again in thinking of Walter Hartright.

“

Because silence is safe, and we have need of safety in this house.

”

No extraordinary event has happened. But I have noticed certain peculiarities in the conduct of Sir Percival and the Count, which have sent me to my bed feeling very anxious and uneasy about Anne Catherick, and about the results which tomorrow may produce.

I know enough by this time, to be sure, that the aspect of Sir Percival which is the most false, and which, therefore, means the worst, is his polite aspect.

That long walk with his friend had ended in improving his manners, especially towards his wife. To Laura’s secret surprise and to my secret alarm, he called her by her Christian name, asked if she had heard lately from her uncle, inquired when Mrs.

On my way to the village I prepared myself for the possibility of meeting Sir Percival. As long as I had him to deal with alone I felt certain of not losing my presence of mind.

Any woman who is sure of her own wits is a match at any time for a man who is not sure of his own temper.

I had no such fear of Sir Percival as I had of the Count. Instead of fluttering, it had composed me, to hear of the errand on which he had gone out.

“I said this:

Human ingenuity, my friend, has hitherto only discovered two ways in which a man can manage a woman.

One way is to knock her down—a method largely adopted by the brutal lower orders of the people, but utterly abhorrent to the refined and educated classes above them.

Do lawyers make your flesh creep? Why should I? It is my business tonight to clear up your position beyond the possibility of mistake, and I have now done it. Here is your position.

If your wife lives, you pay those bills with her signature to the parchment. If your wife dies, you pay them with her death.

”

“My dear friend! what is there extraordinary in that? They are all in love with some other man. Who gets the first of a woman’s heart? In all my experience I have never yet met with the man who was Number One.

Number Two, sometimes. Number Three, Four, Five, often. Number One, never!

He exists, of course—but I have not met with him.”

It is the grand misfortune of my life that nobody will let me alone.

Why—I ask everybody—why worry me? Nobody answers that question, and nobody lets me alone. Relatives, friends, and strangers all combine to annoy me. What have I done? I ask myself, I ask my servant, Louis, fifty times a day—what have I done?

… add a family of your own to an already overcrowded population, you are vindictively marked out by your married friends, who have no similar consideration and no similar self-denial, as the recipient of half their conjugal troubles, and the born friend of all their children.

Husbands and wives talk of the cares of matrimony, and bachelors and spinsters bear them.

Take my own case. I considerately remain single, and my poor dear brother Philip inconsiderately marries. What does he do when he dies? He leaves his daughter to me. She is a sweet girl—she is also a dreadful responsibility. Why lay her on my shoulders?

“As usual,” I said. “

I am nothing but a bundle of nerves dressed up to look like a man.

”

When she was sent away by Sir Percival, his lordship (showing me his sweet little birds at the time) was most kindly anxious to know what had become of her, where she was to go the day she left Blackwater Park, and so on.

It is in such little delicate attentions that the advantages of aristocratic birth always show themselves.

I make no apology for introducing these particulars—they are brought forward in justice to his lordship, whose character, I have reason to know, is viewed rather harshly in certain quarters.

Shall I order for you, shall I market for you, Mrs. Cook? What are you making there? A nice tart for dinner? Much crust, if you please—much crisp crust, my dear, that melts and crumbles delicious in the mouth.” That was his way.

He was past sixty, and fond of pastry. Just think of that!

The doctor came again in the forenoon, and saw for himself that Lady Glyde had woke up better.

In the waters of a new life I had tempered my nature afresh. In the stern school of extremity and danger my will had learnt to be strong, my heart to be resolute, my mind to rely on itself.

I had gone out to fly from my own future. I came back to face it, as a man should.

To face it with that inevitable suppression of myself which I knew it would demand from me. I had parted with the worst bitterness of the past, but not with my heart’s remembrance of the sorrow and the tenderness of that memorable time.

I thought I should see her coming to meet me, with her little straw hat shading her face, her simple dress fluttering in the air, and her well-filled sketchbook ready in her hand.

Oh death, thou hast thy sting! oh, grave, thou hast thy victory!

I turned aside, and there below me in the glen was the lonesome grey church, the porch where I had waited for the coming of the woman in white, the hills encircling the quiet burial-ground, the brook bubbling cold over its stony bed.

From that date until the fifteenth of October (the day of her rescue) she had been under restraint, her identity with Anne Catherick systematically asserted, and her sanity, from first to last, practically denied.

Faculties less delicately balanced, constitutions less tenderly organised, must have suffered under such an ordeal as this. No man could have gone through it and come out of it unchanged.

Arriving at Limmeridge late on the evening of the fifteenth, Miss Halcombe wisely resolved not to attempt the assertion of Lady Glyde’s identity until the next day.

The housework, which, if we had dared trust a stranger near us, would have been done by a servant, was taken on the first day, taken as her own right, by Marian Halcombe.

“What a woman’s hands are fit for,” she said, “early and late, these hands of mine shall do.”

They trembled as she held them out. The wasted arms told their sad story of the past, as she turned up the sleeves of the poor plain dress that she wore for safety’s sake;

I saw the big tears rise thick in her eyes, and fall slowly over her cheeks as she looked at me. She dashed them away with a touch of her old energy, and smiled with a faint reflection of her old good spirits.

“Don’t doubt my courage, Walter,” she pleaded, “it’s my weakness that cries, not me. The housework shall conquer it if I can’t.”

And she kept her word—the victory was won when we met in the evening, and she sat down to rest. Her large steady black eyes looked at me with a flash of their bright firmness of bygone days.

“But you think those facts can be explained away,” interposed Mr. Kyrle. “Let me tell you the result of my experience on that point.

When an English jury has to choose between a plain fact on the surface and a long explanation under the surface, it always takes the fact in preference to the explanation.

For example, Lady Glyde (I call the lady you represent by that name for argument’s sake) declares she has slept at a certain house, and it is proved that she has not slept at that house.

“Exercise your fine natural sense and remain in retirement. Dear and admirable woman, invite no dangerous publicity.

Resignation is sublime⁠—adopt it.

The modest repose of home is eternally fresh—enjoy it. The storms of life pass harmless over the valley of Seclusion—dwell, dear lady, in the valley.

“Exercise your fine natural sense and remain in retirement. Dear and admirable woman, invite no dangerous publicity. Resignation is sublime—adopt it. The modest repose of home is eternally fresh—enjoy it.

The storms of life pass harmless over the valley of Seclusion⁠—dwell, dear lady, in the valley.

“Do this and I authorise you to fear nothing. No new calamity shall lacerate your sensibilities—sensibilities precious to me as my own. You shall not be molested, the fair companion of your retreat shall not be pursued.

No new calamity shall lacerate your sensibilities—sensibilities precious to me as my own. You shall not be molested, the fair companion of your retreat shall not be pursued. She has found a new asylum in your heart.

Priceless asylum!⁠—I envy her and leave her there.

“One last word of affectionate warning, of paternal caution, and I tear myself from the charm of addressing you—I close these fervent lines.

If you have rash friends, moderate their deplorable ardour. If Mr. Hartright returns to England, hold no communication with him.

I walk on a path of my own, and Percival follows at my heels. On the day when Mr. Hartright crosses that path, he is a lost man.

”

The insolent familiarity of the language was too much for her self-control. As she looked at me across the table, her hands clenched themselves in her lap, and the old quick fiery temper flamed out again brightly in her cheeks and her eyes.

“Walter!” she said, “if ever those two men are at your mercy, and if you are obliged to spare one of them, don’t let it be the Count.”

“I will keep this letter, Marian, to help my memory when the time comes.”

“There are two men who can help me, and shall help me in London—Sir Percival and the Count.

Innocent people may well forget the date⁠—but they are guilty, and they know it.

If I fail everywhere else, I mean to force a confession out of one or both of them on my own terms.”

“Well, Marian, when our other resources have failed us, I mean to know the Secret. My old superstition clings to me, even yet. I say again the woman in white is a living influence in our three lives.

The End is appointed⁠—the End is drawing us on⁠—and Anne Catherick, dead in her grave, points the way to it still!

”

“Dead!” said Mrs. Clements, “dead so young, and I am left to hear it!

I made her first short frocks. I taught her to walk. The first time she ever said Mother she said it to me⁠—and now I am left and Anne is taken!

Did you say, sir,” said the poor woman, removing the handkerchief from her face, and looking up at me for the first time, “did you say that she had been nicely buried?

“You work and get money, Walter, and Marian helps you. Why is there nothing I can do? You will end in liking Marian better than you like me—you will, because I am so helpless!

Oh, don’t, don’t, don’t treat me like a child!

”

… drooped helpless in their arid exile of unfinished crescents and squares—the dead house-carcasses that waited in vain for the vivifying human element to animate them with the breath of life—every creature that I saw, every object that I passed, seemed to answer with one accord:

The deserts of Arabia are innocent of our civilised desolation⁠—the ruins of Palestine are incapable of our modern gloom!

I inquired my way to the quarter of the town in which Mrs. Catherick lived, and on reaching it found myself in a square of small houses, one story high.

She put that extraordinary question without the slightest change in her voice, her face, or her manner.

She could not have appeared more perfectly unconcerned if I had told her of the death of the goat in the enclosure outside.

“Why?” I repeated. “Do you ask why I come here to tell you of your daughter’s death?”

Your information would be more satisfactory if you were willing to explain how you became possessed of it.

However, it justifies me, I suppose, in going into mourning. There is not much alteration necessary in my dress, as you see. When I have changed my mittens, I shall be all in black.

”

… you like, you may distrust me as much as you please, you may be as angry as you will—but, of all the women in England, you, if you have any sense of injury, are the woman who ought to help me to crush that man.”

“Crush him for yourself,” she said; “then come back here, and see what I say to you.”

She spoke those words as she had not spoken yet, quickly, fiercely, vindictively. I had stirred in its lair the serpent-hatred of years, but only for a moment.

There she was again, not a minute after I had left her, placed purposely in a position which made it a matter of common courtesy on the part of the clergyman to bow to her for a second time. He raised his hat once more.

I saw the hard ghastly face behind the window soften, and light up with gratified pride⁠—I saw the head with the grim black cap bend ceremoniously in return.

The clergyman had bowed to her, and in my presence, twice in one day!

He raised his hat once more. I saw the hard ghastly face behind the window soften, and light up with gratified pride—I saw the head with the grim black cap bend ceremoniously in return.

The clergyman had bowed to her, and in my presence, twice in one day!

The dripping of the rain on it was audible in the dreadful silence. I looked up, along the cloth, and there at the end, stark and grim and black, in the yellow light—there was his dead face.

So, for the first and last time, I saw him. So the Visitation of God ruled it that he and I should meet.

What changes met me when I got there!

Through all the ways of our unintelligible world the trivial and the terrible walk hand in hand together.

The irony of circumstances holds no mortal catastrophe in respect. When I reached the church, the trampled condition of the burial-ground was the only serious trace left to tell of the fire and the death.

Through all the ways of our unintelligible world the trivial and the terrible walk hand in hand together.

The irony of circumstances holds no mortal catastrophe in respect.

When I reached the church, the trampled condition of the burial-ground was the only serious trace left to tell of the fire and the death. A rough hoarding of boards had been knocked up before the vestry doorway.

One of the village women, whose white wild face I remembered the picture of terror when we pulled down the beam, was giggling with another woman, the picture of inanity, over an old washing-tub.

There is nothing serious in mortality!

Solomon in all his glory was Solomon with the elements of the contemptible lurking in every fold of his robes and in every corner of his palace.

I would have died first. Besides, the allowance was a handsome one. I had a better income, a better house over my head, better carpets on my floors, than half the women who turned up the whites of their eyes at the sight of me.

The dress of Virtue, in our parts, was cotton print. I had silk.

So I accepted the conditions he offered me, and made the best of them, and fought my battle with my respectable neighbours on their own ground, and won it in course of time—as you saw yourself.

It is not my intention to leave Welmingham. There are one or two little advantages which I have still to gain in the town. The clergyman bows to me—as you saw. He is married, and his wife is not quite so civil.

I propose to join the Dorcas Society, and I mean to make the clergyman’s wife bow to me next.

If you favour me with your company, pray understand that the conversation must be entirely on general subjects. Any attempted reference to this letter will be quite useless—I am determined not to acknowledge having written it.

You can have no possible cause to complain of these precautions, seeing that they do not affect the information I here communicate, in consideration of the special indulgence which you have deserved at my hands.

My hour for tea is half-past five, and my buttered toast waits for nobody.

When Laura had left us, and when we could speak to one another without restraint, I tried to give some expression to the gratitude and the admiration which filled my heart. But the generous creature would not wait to hear me.

That sublime self-forgetfulness of women, which yields so much and asks so little, turned all her thoughts from herself to me.

“I had only a moment left before post-time,” she said, “or I should have written less abruptly. You look worn and weary, Walter. I am afraid my letter must have seriously alarmed you?”

“I believe it, Marian.

The best men are not consistent in good⁠—why should the worst men be consistent in evil?

At the same time, I suspect him of merely attempting to frighten you, by threatening what he cannot really do. I doubt his power of annoying us, by means of the owner of the asylum, now that Sir Percival is dead, and Mrs.

So the ghostly figure which has haunted these pages, as it haunted my life, goes down into the impenetrable gloom.

Like a shadow she first came to me in the loneliness of the night. Like a shadow she passes away in the loneliness of the dead.

Changed as all the circumstances now were, our position towards each other in the golden days of our first companionship seemed to be revived with the revival of our love.

It was as if Time had drifted us back on the wreck of our early hopes to the old familiar shore!

To any other woman I could have spoken the decisive words which I still hesitated to speak to her.

“Come out on my little finger, my pret-pret-pretties!” cried the voice. “Come out and hop upstairs! One, two, three—and up! Three, two, one—and down! One, two, three—twit-twit-twit-tweet!”

The Count was exercising his canaries as he used to exercise them in Marian’s time at Blackwater Park.

I waited a little while, and the singing and the whistling ceased. “Come, kiss me, my pretties!” said the deep voice.

He crossed the road and walked towards the western boundary of the Regent’s Park. I kept on my own side of the way, a little behind him, and walked in that direction also.

Marian had prepared me for his high stature, his monstrous corpulence, and his ostentatious mourning garments, but not for the horrible freshness and cheerfulness and vitality of the man.

He carried his sixty years as if they had been fewer than forty.

At the more refined passages of the singing, at the more delicate phases of the music, which passed unapplauded by others, his fat hands, adorned with perfectly-fitting black kid gloves, softly patted each other, in token of the cultivated appreciation of a musical man.

At such times, his oily murmur of approval, “Bravo! Bra-a-a-a!” hummed through the silence, like the purring of a great cat.

His immediate neighbours on either side—hearty, ruddy-faced people from the country, basking amazedly in the sunshine of fashionable London—seeing and hearing him, began to follow his lead.

… long ago, that you have conveniently forgotten what blood you shed, and what extremities you proceeded to in the conquering—it is not for you to say how far the worst of all exasperations may, or may not, carry the maddened men of an enslaved nation.

The iron that has entered into our souls has gone too deep for you to find it.

Leave the refugee alone!

The harsh grating noise of something heavy that he was moving unseen to me sounded for a moment, then ceased. The silence that followed was so intense that the faint ticking nibble of the white mice at their wires was distinctly audible where I stood.

My life hung by a thread, and I knew it.

At that final moment I thought with his mind, I felt with his fingers—I was as certain as if I had seen it of what he kept hidden from me in the drawer.

“I want one moment for my own thoughts, if you please. Do you guess what I am thinking about?”

“I am thinking,” he remarked quietly, “whether I shall add to the disorder in this room by scattering your brains about the fireplace.”

If I had moved at that moment, I saw in his face that he would have done it.

He read the lines aloud: “Your letter is received. If I don’t hear from you before the time you mention, I will break the seal when the clock strikes.”

Another man in his position would have needed some explanation of those words⁠—the Count felt no such necessity.

One reading of the note showed him the precaution that I had taken as plainly as if he had been present at the time when I adopted it.

“What! you think I shall poison you?” he said gaily.

“The English intellect is sound, so far as it goes,” he continued, seating himself at the table; “but it has one grave defect⁠—it is always cautious in the wrong place.”

He dipped his pen in the ink, placed the first slip of paper before him with a thump of his hand on the desk, cleared his throat, and began.

“Amuse Mr. Hartright, my angel,” said the Count. He placed a chair for her, kissed her hand for the second time, withdrew to a sofa, and, in three minutes, was as peacefully and happily asleep as the most virtuous man in existence.

Madame Fosco took a book from the table, sat down, and looked at me, with the steady vindictive malice of a woman who never forgot and never forgave.

“I have been listening to your conversation with my husband,” she said. “If I had been in his place—I would have laid you dead on the hearthrug.”

Madame Fosco took a book from the table, sat down, and looked at me, with the steady vindictive malice of a woman who never forgot and never forgave.

“I have been listening to your conversation with my husband,” she said. “If I had been in his place⁠—I would have laid you dead on the hearthrug.”

With those words she opened her book, and never looked at me or spoke to me from that time till the time when her husband woke.