I hope you don’t expect me to be naughty and stupid.

Middlemarch by George Eliot

'Could I not be preparing myself now to be more useful?’ said Dorothea to him, one morning early in the time of courtship; ‘could I not learn to read Latin and Greek aloud to you, as Milton’s daughters did to their father, without understanding what they read?’

‘I fear that would be wearisome to you,’ said Mr. Casaubon, smiling, ‘and, indeed, if I remember rightly, the young women you have mentioned regarded that exercise in unknown tongues as a ground for rebellion against the poet.’

‘Yes; but in the first place they were very naughty girls, else they would have been proud to minister to such a father; and in the second place they might have studied privately and taught themselves to understand what they read, and then it would have been interesting. I hope you don’t expect me to be naughty and stupid.’