Vanity Fair | Page 7

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 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 was chiefly intrusted, might
have soothed and interested