I must warn you at the outset that I'm not at my best conversing with little girls," he announced.
I bit my lip and kept my mouth shut.
"A boy is content to be made into a civil man by caning, or any one of a number of other stratagems, but a girl, being disqualified by Nature, as it were, from such physical brutality, must remain forever something of a terra incognita. Don't you think?

Auteur: Alan Bradley