Here, leaning over the banister, I cried out suddenly, and without
at all deliberating on my words "They are not fit to associate with me."

Mrs. Reed was rather a stout woman; but, on hearing this strange and
audacious declaration, she ran nimbly up the stair, swept me like a
whirlwind into the nursery, and crushing me down on the edge of my
crib, dared me in an emphatic voice to rise from that place, or
utter one syllable during the remainder of the day.

"What would Uncle Reed say to you, if he were alive?" was my
scarcely voluntary demand. I say scarcely voluntary, for it seemed
as if my tongue pronounced words without my will consenting to their
utterance: something spoke out of me over which I had no control.

"What?" said Mrs. Reed under her breath: her usually cold composed
grey eye became troubled with a look like fear; she took her hand
from my arm, and gazed at me as if she really did not know whether I
were child or fiend. I was now in for it.

"My Uncle Reed is in heaven, and can see all you do and think; and
so can papa and mama: they know how you shut me up all day long,
and how you wish me dead."

Mrs. Reed soon rallied her spirits: she shook me most soundly, she
boxed both my ears, and then left me without a word. Bessie
supplied the hiatus by a homily of an hour's length, in which she
proved beyond a doubt that I was the most wicked and abandoned child
ever reared under a roof. I half believed her; for I felt indeed
only bad feelings surging in my breast.