Moll Flanders | Page 6

says I, again very innocently; 'let me but live with you.'
'Why, can you live without victuals?' says she.
'Yes,' again says I, very much like a child, you may be sure, and still I cried heartily.
I had no policy in all this; you may easily see it was all nature; but it was joined with so
much innocence and so much passion that, in short, it set the good motherly creature
a-weeping too, and she cried at last as fast as I did, and then took me and led me out of
the teaching-room. 'Come,' says she, 'you shan't go to service; you shall live with me';
and this pacified me for the present.
Some time after this, she going to wait on the Mayor, and talking of such things as
belonged to her business, at last my story came up, and my good nurse told Mr. Mayor
the whole tale. He was so pleased with it, that he would call his lady and his two
daughters to hear it, and it made mirth enough among them, you may be sure.
However, not a week had passed over, but on a sudden comes Mrs. Mayoress and her two
daughters to the house to see my old nurse, and to see her school and the children. When
they had looked about them a little, 'Well, Mrs. ----,' says the Mayoress to my nurse, 'and
pray which is the little lass that intends to be a gentlewoman?' I heard her, and I was
terribly frighted at first, though I did not know why neither; but Mrs. Mayoress comes up
to me. 'Well, miss,' says she, 'and what are you at work upon?' The word miss was a
language that had hardly been heard of in our school, and I wondered what sad name it
was she called me. However, I stood up, made a curtsy, and she took my work out of my
hand, looked on it, and said it was very well; then she took up one of the hands. 'Nay,'
says she, 'the child may come to be a gentlewoman for aught anybody knows; she has a
gentlewoman's hand,' says she. This pleased me mightily, you may be sure; but Mrs.
Mayoress did not stop there, but giving me my work again, she put her hand in her pocket,
gave me a shilling, and bid me mind my work, and learn to work well, and I might be a
gentlewoman for aught she knew.
Now all this while my good old nurse, Mrs. Mayoress, and all the rest of them did not
understand me at all, for they meant one sort of thing by the word gentlewoman, and I
meant quite another; for alas! all I understood by being a gentlewoman was to be able to

work for myself, and get enough to keep me without that terrible bugbear going to service,
whereas they meant to live great, rich and high, and I know not what.
Well, after Mrs. Mayoress was gone, her two daughters came in, and they called for the
gentlewoman too, and they talked a long while to me, and I answered them in my
innocent way; but always, if they asked me whether I resolved to be a gentlewoman, I
answered Yes. At last one of them asked me what a gentlewoman was? That puzzled me
much; but, however, I explained myself negatively, that it was one that did not go to
service, to do housework. They were pleased to be familiar with me, and like my little
prattle to them, which, it seems, was agreeable enough to them, and they gave me money
too.
As for my money, I gave it all to my mistress-nurse, as I called her, and told her she
should have all I got for myself when I was a gentlewoman, as well as now. By this and
some other of my talk, my old tutoress began to understand me about what I meant by
being a gentlewoman, and that I understood by it no more than to be able to get my bread
by my own work; and at last she asked me whether it was not so.
I told her, yes, and insisted on it, that to do so was to be a gentlewoman; 'for,' says I,
'there is such a one,' naming a woman that mended lace and washed the ladies'
laced-heads; 'she,' says I, 'is a gentlewoman, and they call her madam.'
"Poor child,' says my good old nurse, 'you may soon be such a gentlewoman as that, for
she is a person of ill fame, and has had two or three bastards.'
I did not understand anything of that; but I answered, 'I am sure they call her madam, and
she does not go to