man
of the French nation, who was by profession an opera-girl, who had had
some education somewhere, and her daughter Rebecca spoke French with
purity and a Parisian accent. It was in those days rather a rare
accomplishment, and led to her engagement with the orthodox Miss
Pinkerton. For, her mother being dead, her father, finding himself
fatally ill, as a consequence of his bad habits, wrote a manly and
pathetic letter to Miss Pinkerton, recommending the orphan child to her
protection, and so descended to the grave, after two bailiffs had
quarrelled over his corpse. Rebecca was seventeen when she came to
Chiswick, and was bound over as an articled pupil; her duties being to
talk French, as we have seen; and her privileges to live cost free, and
with a few guineas a year, to gather scraps of knowledge from the
professors who attended the school.

She was small, and slight in person; pale, sandy-haired, and with eyes
almost habitually cast down. When they looked up, they were very large,
odd, and attractive. By the side of many tall and bouncing young ladies
in the establishment Rebecca Sharp looked like a child. But she had the
dismal precocity of poverty. Many a dun had she talked to, and turned
away from her father's door; many a tradesman had she coaxed and wheedled
into good-humour, and into the granting of one meal more. She had sat
commonly with her father, who was very proud of her wit, and heard the
talk of many of his wild companions, often but ill-suited for a girl to
hear; but she had never been a girl, she said; she had been a woman since
she was eight years old.

Miss Jemima, however, believed her to be the most innocent creature in
the world, so admirably did Rebecca play the part of a child on the
occasions when her father brought her to Chiswick as a young girl, and
only a year before her father's death, and when she was sixteen years
old, Miss Pinkerton majestically and with a little speech made her a
present of a doll, which was, by the way, the confiscated property of
Miss Swindle, discovered surreptitiously nursing it in school-hours. How
the father and daughter laughed as they trudged home together after the
evening party, and how Miss Pinkerton would have raged had she seen the
caricature of herself which the little mimic, Rebecca, managed to make
out of the doll. Becky used to go through dialogues with it; it formed
the delight of the circle of young painters who frequented the studio,
who used