"William Makepeace Thackeray. Vanity fair" - читать интересную книгу автора

Rebecca's mother had had some education somewhere,
and her daughter 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 not likely to recover, after his third attack of
delirium tremens, 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 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