He resented the topic on her lips and, by way of changing the subject, suggested that she should read. She turned to her book and read aloud the first five pages in a queer, strained, high-pitched voice that he knew for a product of the Board School, where every variance of the process called education is a kind of stiff drill. When she came to the end of a paragraph he took the book and read to her, and she listened raptly, for his diction was good. After he had come to the end of the first chapter she asked for the book again and produced a rather mincing but wonderfully accurate copy of his manner. She did not wait for his comment but banged the book shut, threw it on the bed, and said:
“That’s better. I knew I could do it. I knew I was clever. . . . You’ll stop ’ere for a bit when you’re better. You mustn’t mind uncle. I’ll be awfully nice to you, I will. I’ll be a servant to you and make you comfortable, and I won’t ask for no wages. . . .”
“My dear child,” replied Old Mole, “you can’t possibly have enjoyed it more than I.”
She was eager on that.
“Did you really, really like it?”
“I did really.”
So began the education of Matilda. At first he drew up, for his own use, a sort of curriculum—arithmetic, algebra, geography, history, literature, grammar, orthography—and a time-table, two hours a day for six days in the week, but he very soon found that she absolutely refused to learn anything that did not interest her, and that he had to adapt his time to hers. Sometimes she would come to him for twenty minutes; sometimes she would devote the whole afternoon to him. When they had galloped through Oman’s “History of England” she declined to continue that study, and after one lesson in geography she burned the primer he had sent her out to buy. When he asked her where Ipswich was she turned it over in her mind, decided that it had a foreign sound and plumped for Germany. She did not seem to mind in the least when he told her it was in England, in the Eastern Counties. . . . On the other hand, when he procured their itinerary for the next few months from Mr. Copas and marked it out on the map for her, she was keenly interested and he seized on the occasion to point out Ipswich and, having engaged her attention, all the county towns of England and Scotland.
“Where were you born?” she asked.
He found the village in Lincolnshire.
“And did you go to a boarding-school?”