“It's my neuralgia,” she said again. “It's from my eyes partly, I expect.”
“It's better to be sick,” continued Jeremy, “if you can be—”
She flung him then a desperate look, as though she were really an animal at bay.
“You see, I can't go away,” she said. “I've nowhere to go to. I've no friends, nor relations, and no one will take me for their children, if Mrs. Cole says I can't keep order.”
“Then I suppose you'd go to the workhouse,” continued Jeremy, pursuing her case with excited interest. “That's what the Jampot always used to say, that one day she'd end in the workhouse; and that's a horrible place, SHE said, where there was nothing but porridge to eat, and sometimes they took all your clothes off and scrubbed your back with that hard yellow soap they wash Hamlet with.”
His eyes grew wide with the horrible picture.
“Oh, Miss Jones, you mustn't go there!”
“Would you mind,” she said, “just getting me some water from the jug over there? There's a glass there.”
Still proud of the level to which he had been raised, but puzzled beyond any words as to this new realisation of Miss Jones, he fetched her the water, then, standing quite close to her, he said:
“You must stay with us, always.”