Page 162 - bleak-house

I am very fond of being confided in by children and am
happy in being usually favoured in that respect, but on this
occasion it gave me great uneasiness. As soon as we were
out of doors, Egbert, with the manner of a little footpad,
demanded a shilling of me on the ground that his pocket-
money was ‘boned’ from him. On my pointing out the great
impropriety of the word, especially in connexion with his
parent (for he added sulkily ‘By her!’), he pinched me and
said, ‘Oh, then! Now! Who are you! YOU wouldn’t like it, I
think? What does she make a sham for, and pretend to give
me money, and take it away again? Why do you call it my
allowance, and never let me spend it?’ These exasperating
questions so inflamed his mind and the minds of Oswald
and Francis that they all pinched me at once, and in a dread-
fully expert way— screwing up such little pieces of my arms
that I could hardly forbear crying out. Felix, at the same
time, stamped upon my toes. And the Bond of Joy, who on
account of always having the whole of his little income an-
ticipated stood in fact pledged to abstain from cakes as well
as tobacco, so swelled with grief and rage when we passed
a pastry-cook’s shop that he terrified me by becoming pur-
ple. I never underwent so much, both in body and mind,
in the course of a walk with young people as from these
unnaturally constrained children when they paid me the
compliment of being natural.
I was glad when we came to the brickmaker’s house,
though it was one of a cluster of wretched hovels in a
brick-field, with pigsties close to the broken windows and
miserable little gardens before the doors growing nothing

162 Bleak House