Джейн Эйр / Jane Eyre

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�What other things? Can you tell me some of them?’

How much I wished to reply fully to this question! How difficult it was to frame any answer! Children can feel, but they cannot analyse their feelings; and if the analysis is partially effected in thought, they know not how to express the result of the process in 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 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.