Jane Eyre

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 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.
    »Well, well; who knows what may happen?« said Mr. Lloyd, as he got up: »The child ought to have change of air and scene;« he added, speaking to himself, »nerves not in a good state.«
    Bessie now returned; at the same moment the carriage was heard rolling up the gravel-walk.
    »Is that your mistress, nurse?« asked Mr. Lloyd: »I should like to speak to her before I go.«
    Bessie invited him to walk into the breakfast-room, and led the way out. In the interview which followed between him and Mrs. Reed, I presume, from after-occurrences, that the apothecary ventured to recommend my being sent to school; and the recommendation was no doubt readily enough adopted: for as Abbot said, in discussing the subject with Bessie when both sat sewing in the nursery one night, after I was in bed, and, as they thought, asleep, »Missis was, she dared say, glad enough to get rid of such a tiresome, ill-conditioned child, who always looked as if she were watching everybody, and scheming plots underhand.« Abbot, I think, gave me credit for being a sort of infantine Guy Fawkes.
    On that same occasion I learned, for the first time, from Miss Abbot's communications to Bessie, that my father had been a poor clergyman; that my mother had married him against the wishes of her friends, who considered the match beneath her; that my grandfather Reed was so irritated at her disobedience, he cut her off without a shilling; that after my mother and father had been married a year, the latter caught the typhus fever while visiting among the poor of a large manufacturing town where his curacy was situated, and where that disease was then prevalent; that my mother took the infection from him, and both died within a month of each other.
    Bessie, when she heard this narrative, sighed and said, »Poor Miss Jane is to be pitied, too, Abbot.«
    »Yes,« responded Abbot, »if she were a nice, pretty child, one might compassionate her forlornness; but one really cannot care for such a little toad as that.«
    »Not a great deal, to be sure,« agreed Bessie: »at any rate a beauty like Miss Georgiana would be more moving in the same condition.«
    »Yes, I doat on Miss Georgiana!« cried the fervent Abbot. »Little darling!