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of relieving my grief by imparting it, I, after a disturbed pause,
contrived to frame a meagre, though, as far as it went, true
response.

"For one thing, I have no father or mother, brothers or sisters."

"You have a kind aunt and cousins."

Again I paused; then bunglingly enounced -

"But John Reed knocked me down, and my aunt shut me up in the red-
room."

Mr. Lloyd a second time produced his snuff-box.

"Don't you think Gateshead Hall a very beautiful house?" asked
he. "Are you not very thankful to have such a fine place to live
at?"

"It is not my house, sir; and Abbot says I have less right to be
here than a servant."

"Pooh! you can't be silly enough to wish to leave such a splendid
place?"

"If I had anywhere else to go, I should be glad to leave it; but
I can never get away from Gateshead till I am a woman."

"Perhaps you may -- who knows? Have you any relations besides Mrs.
Reed?"

"I think not, sir."

"None belonging to your father?"

"I don't know. I asked Aunt Reed once, and she said possibly
I might have some poor, low relations called Eyre, but she knew
nothing about them."

"If you had such, would you like to go to them?"

I reflected. Poverty looks grim to grown people; still more
so to children: they have not much idea of industrious, working,
respectable poverty; they think of the word only as connected with
ragged clothes, scanty food, fireless grates, rude manners, and
debasing vices: poverty for me was synonymous with degradation.

"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

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