I bit my lip. He was right. But it wasn''t so much the risk that troubled me. You cannot be a thief and always troubling over hazards, you should go mad. It was only that I was not sure I wanted any kind of holiday. I was not sure I cared for it away from the Borough. I had once gone with Mrs Sucksby to visit her cousin in Bromley; I had come home with hives. I remembered the country as quiet and queer, and the people in it either simpletons or gipsies.
How would I like living with a simpleton girl? She would not be like Dainty, who was only slightly touched and only sometimes
violent. She might be really mad. She might try and throttle me; and there would be no-one about, for miles and miles, to hear me calling. Gipsies would be no use, they were all for themselves. Everyone knows a gipsy would not cross the street to spit on you, if you were on fire.
I said, ''This girl—what''s she like.'''' You said she''s queer in her head.''
''Not queer,'' said Gentleman. ''Only what I should call fey. She''s an innocent, a natural. She has been kept from the world. She''s an orphan, like you are; but where you had Mrs Sucksby to sharpen you up, she had—no-one.''
Dainty looked at him then. Her mother had been a drunkard, and got drowned in the river. Her father had used to beat her. He beat her sister till she died. She said, in a whisper:
''Ain''t it terribly w