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?”