“Do your pains come often?” asked Jeremy.
“I have them, too,” said Jeremy. “It's generally, I expect, because I eat too much--at least, the Jampot used to say so. They're in my head sometimes, too. And then I'm really sick. Do you feel sick?”
Miss Jones began to pull herself together. She wiped her eyes and patted her hair.
“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.
“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:
She looked up at him, and they exchanged a glance.
With that glance Miss Jones learnt more about children than she had ever learnt before--more, indeed, than most people learn in all their mortal lives.
“I can't stay,” she said, and she even smiled a little, “if you're always naughty.”
“We won't be naughty any more.” He sighed. “It was great fun, of course, but we won't do it any more. We never knew you minded.”
“At least, we never thought about you at all. Helen did sometimes. She said you had a headache when you were very yellow in the morning, but I said it was only because you were old. But we'll be good now. I'll tell them too--”
Then he added: “But you won't go away now even if we're not always good? We won't always be, I suppose; and I'm going to school in September, and it will be better then, I expect. I'm too old, really, to learn with girls now.”