waterman's boy did not know any subscribers. None of them could go to an academy like Mr. Kinross's at Hackney, at sixty guineas a year. They had Theodora, twice a week, for two hours, and in return Mrs. Bartle had printed her book.
That was the bargain, and Theodora was prouder of it than of anything she had ever done. She had written A Plain Address over one long winter at Coldharbour, at night, in a cold room, because she had read everything she could find on the instruction of the deaf and found that every word of it had been written by gentlemen who ran schools and wanted their methods admired, and none of it by anyone who had sat on a nursery floor with a looking glass. She had written it for the mothers. For the chandlers and the watermen and the washerwomen, and for Lady Ivers too, if Lady Ivers would ever read it, which she would not. It said that a deaf child was not a slow child. It said that hands were not shameful and speech was not everything. It said that the deaf were not hard to talk to; the world was merely in the habit of mumbling. It was forty-eight pages long, and it cost a shilling, and Mrs. Bartle had printed three hundred copies and sold two hundred and forty, and every shilling of the profit had gone into the green notebook, under School.
Twenty-three pounds, four shillings, and sixpence. She needed sixty, to take a room for a year and pay a girl to keep it and buy slates and coals and a few books. She needed sixty pounds, and eleven names were waiting on her list, and Joby was getting too old to sit at a printer's table among the type cases, and she had promised. She had promised them all.
Nobody in Half Moon Street knew. Nobody in Wiltshire knew. Her father might have guessed, once, when she asked him for the loan of Defoe's Life of Duncan Campbell and the Abbé de l'Épée's book in French, but her father guessed a great many things and said very little about any of them. If her mother learned that her daughter, Miss Ivers of Coldharbour, had been going alone to a printshop in Fetter Lane twice a week to keep school for washerwomen's children, Lady Ivers would not faint. She would do something far worse. She would be practical. She would take Theodora home to Wiltshire before the end of the week and keep her there, and Piers would go to Hackney, where they tied the children's hands to their chairs during lessons so that they would learn to speak, and that would be the end of it.