Chapter 13 — the first interview; the paintings

The next evening Mrs. Fairfax tells Jane the master has summoned her and Adèle to the drawing room. Adèle is delighted; Jane changes into her best black dress. Rochester is by the fire when they enter, brooding and offhand. He acknowledges Jane with a brief nod; he gives Adèle a present from a box on the table; he ignores Jane through most of the half-hour while Adèle babbles in French about the gift.

Eventually he turns to Jane. He examines her face, her plain dress, her bearing. He asks her abrupt questions: where she has lived, what she has read, where she has been. Jane answers plainly — without flattery, without anxiety, sometimes with a faint dryness of her own. He notices. He sends for her portfolio, three watercolors she has carried with her from Lowood: a green sea with a shipwreck and a drowned body, a moonlit head crowned with stars against a stormy sky, an iceberg in a polar landscape with a single white-winged bird above it. The paintings are strange, visionary, formally ambitious. He studies them for a long time, holding each up to the candle. He asks where she got the conceptions. She says, simply, from her head.

The conversation moves to whether the paintings express what she had seen with her mind's eye; she says no, that the technique falls short of the vision. He nods gravely and concedes the same is true of all serious work. The exchange is the first of its kind in the novel — an employer talking to a governess as an equal in matters of mind. The asymmetry of station is intact; the asymmetry of mind has begun to dissolve. Mrs. Fairfax, on the way upstairs, tells Jane in a low voice that the master is "peculiar" — a difficult man, gentle at heart, made strange by family troubles she will not detail.