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

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