mona lisa smile

mona lisa smile
'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.
mona lisa smile
'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?'
mona lisa smile