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 (it was on the occasion of the speeches, when all the professors
were invited) and how Miss Pinkerton would have raged had she seen the
caricature of herself which the little mimic, Rebecca, managed to make
out of her doll. Becky used to go through dialogues with it; it formed
the delight of Newman Street, Gerrard Street, and the Artists' quarter:
and the young painters, when they came to take their gin-and-water with
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