WUTHERING HEIGHTS A monologue from the novel by

WUTHERING HEIGHTS
A monologue from the                        novel by Emily Brontë

NOTE: This monologue is reprinted                                    from Wuthering Heights. Emily Brontë. New York: Harper                                    & Brothers, 1848.

HEATHCLIFF: She abandoned them under a delusion, picturing in me a hero of romance, and expecting unlimited indulgences from my chivalrous devotion. I can hardly regard her in the light  of a rational creature, so obstinately has she persisted in forming   a fabulous notion of my character and acting on the false impressions she cherished. But, at last, I think she begins to know me: I don't perceive the silly smiles and grimaces that provoked meat first; and the senseless incapability of discerning that I was in earnest when I gave her my opinion of her infatuation  and herself. It was a marvellous effort of perspicacity to discover that I did not love her. I believed, at one time, no lessons  could teach her that! And yet it is poorly learnt; for this morning she announced, as a piece of appalling intelligence, that I had   actually succeeded in making her hate me! A positive labour of Hercules, I assure you! If it be achieved, I have cause to return   thanks. Can I trust your assertion, Isabella? Are you sure you hate me? If I let you alone for half a day, won't you come sighing and wheedling to me again? I daresay she would rather I had seemed  all tenderness before you: it wounds her vanity to have the truth  exposed. But I don't care who knows that the passion was wholly on one side: and I never told her a lie about it. She cannot   accuse me of showing one bit of deceitful softness. The first  thing she saw me do, on coming out of the Grange, was to hang  up her little dog; and when she pleaded for it, the first words   I uttered were a wish that I had the hanging of every being belonging to her, except one: possibly she took that exception for herself.But no brutality disgusted her: I suppose she has an innate admiration  of it, if only her precious person were secure from injury! Now,was it not the depth of absurdity -- of genuine idiocy, for that  pitiful, slavish, mean-minded brach to dream that I could love her? Tell your master, Nelly, that I never, in all my life, met with such an abject thing as she is. She even disgraces the nameof Linton; and I've sometimes relented, from pure lack of invention, in my experiments on what she could endure, and still creep shamefully cringing back! But tell him, also, to set his fraternal and magisterial heart at ease: that I keep strictly within the limits of the law. I have avoided, up to this period, giving her the slightest  right to claim a separation; and, what's more, she'd thank nobody for dividing us. If she desired to go, she might: the nuisance of her presence outweighs the gratification to be derived from tormenting her!