their lazy, dissolute, clever, jovial senior, used regularly to ask
Rebecca if Miss Pinkerton was at home: she was as well known to
them, poor soul! as Mr. Lawrence or President West. Once Rebecca
had the honour to pass a few days at Chiswick; after which she
brought back Jemima, and erected another doll as Miss Jemmy: for
though that honest creature had made and given her jelly and cake
enough for three children, and a seven-shilling piece at parting,
the girl's sense of ridicule was far stronger than her gratitude,
and she sacrificed Miss Jemmy quite as pitilessly as her sister.

The catastrophe came, and she was brought to the Mall as to her
home. The rigid formality of the place suffocated her: the prayers
and the meals, the lessons and the walks, which were arranged with a
conventual regularity, oppressed her almost beyond endurance; and
she looked back to the freedom and the beggary of the old studio in
Soho with so much regret, that everybody, herself included, fancied
she was consumed with grief for her father. She had a little room
in the garret, where the maids heard her walking and sobbing at
night; but it was with rage, and not with grief. She had not been
much of a dissembler, until now her loneliness taught her to feign.
She had never mingled in the society of women: her father, reprobate
as he was, was a man of talent; his conversation was a thousand
times more agreeable to her than the talk of such of her own sex as
she now encountered. The pompous vanity of the old schoolmistress,
the foolish good-humour of her sister, the silly chat and scandal of
the elder girls, and the frigid correctness of the governesses
equally annoyed her; and she had no soft maternal heart, this
unlucky girl, otherwise the prattle and talk of the younger
children, with whose care she was chiefly intrusted, might have
soothed and interested her; but she lived among them two years, and