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
habitually cast down: when they looked up they were very large, odd,
and attractive; so attractive that the Reverend Mr. Crisp, fresh from
Oxford, and curate to the Vicar of Chiswick, the Reverend Mr.
Flowerdew, fell in love with Miss Sharp; being shot dead by a glance of
her eyes which was fired all the way across Chiswick Church from the
school-pew to the reading-desk. This infatuated young man used
sometimes to take tea with Miss Pinkerton, to whom he had been
presented by his mamma, and actually proposed something like marriage
in an intercepted note, which the one-eyed apple-woman was charged to
deliver. Mrs. Crisp was summoned from Buxton, and abruptly carried off
her darling boy; but the idea, even, of such an eagle in the Chiswick
dovecot caused a great flutter in the breast of Miss Pinkerton, who
would have sent away Miss Sharp but that she was bound to her under a
forfeit, and who never could thoroughly believe the young lady's
protestations that she had never exchanged a single word with Mr.
Crisp, except under her own eyes on the two occasions when she had met
him at tea.

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
sate 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 never had been a girl, she said; she had been a
woman since she was eight years old. Oh, why did Miss Pinkerton let
such a dangerous bird into her cage?

The fact is, the old lady believed Rebecca to be the meekest creature
in the world, so admirably, on the occasions when her father brought
her to Chiswick, used Rebecca to perform the part of the ingenue; and
only a year before the arrangement by which Rebecca had been admitted
into her house, and when Rebecca was sixteen years old, Miss Pinkerton
majestically, and with a little speech, made her