CHAPTER III 29
" No; I should not like to belong to poor people," was my reply.
" Not even if they were kind to you?"
I shook my head: I could not see how poor people had the means of being kind; and then to learn to speak like them, to adopt their manners, to be uneducated, to grow up like one of the poor women I saw sometimes nursing their children or washing their clothes at the cottage doors of the village of Gateshead: no, I was not heroic enough to purchase liberty at the price of caste.
" But are your relatives so very poor? Are they working people?"
" I cannot tell; Aunt. Reed says if I have any, they must be a beggarly set: I should not like to go a begging."
" Would you like to go to school?"
Again I reflected: I scarcely knew what school was: Bessie sometimes spoke of it as a place where young ladies sat in the stocks, wore backboards, and were expected to be exceedingly genteel and precise: John Reed hated his school, and abused his master; but John Reed ' s tastes were no rule for mine, and if Bessie ' s accounts of school-discipline( gathered from the young ladies of a family where she had lived before coming to Gateshead) were somewhat appalling, her details of certain accomplishments attained by these same young ladies were, I thought, equally attractive. She boasted of beautiful paintings of landscapes and flowers by them executed; of songs they could sing and pieces they could play, of purses they could net, of French books they could translate; till my spirit was moved to emulation as I listened. Besides, school would be a complete change: it implied a long journey, an entire separation from Gateshead, an entrance into a new life.
" I should indeed like to go to school," was the audible conclusion of my musings.