words. Fearful,
however, of losing this first and only opportunity of relieving my
grief by imparting it, I, after a disturbed pause, contrived to frame a
meager, 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 

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