's
little girl.) They did not avoid her. They giggled, cackled, tattled, condoled,
consoled, and patronized her until they drove her almost wild with rage. To be
patronized by them! she thought as they went away simpering after kissing her.
And she heard Beaumoris's laugh ringing on the stair, and knew quite well how to
interpret his hilarity.
    It was after this visit that Becky, who had paid her weekly bills, Becky who
had made herself agreeable to everybody in the house, who smiled at the
landlady, called the waiters Monsieur, and paid the chambermaids in politeness
and apologies what far more than compensated for a little niggardliness in point
of money (of which Becky never was free) - that Becky, we say, received a notice
to quit from the landlord, who had been told by some one that she was quite an
unfit person to have at his hotel, where English ladies would not sit down with
her. And she was forced to fly into lodgings, of which the dullness and solitude
were most wearisome to her.
    Still she held up, in spite of these rebuffs, and tried to make a character
for herself, and conquer scandal. She went to church very regularly, and sang
louder than anybody there. She took up the cause of the widows of the
shipwrecked fishermen, and gave work and drawings for the Quashyboo Mission; she
subscribed to the Assembly, and wouldn't waltz. In a word, she did everything
that was respectable, and that is why we dwell upon this part of her career with
more fondness than upon subsequent parts of her history, which are not so
pleasant. She saw people avoiding her, and still laboriously smiled upon them;
you never could suppose from her countenance what pangs of humiliation she might
be enduring inwardly.
    Her history was after all a mystery. Parties were divided about her. Some
people, who took the trouble to busy themselves in the matter, said that she was
the criminal; whilst others vowed that she was as innocent as a lamb, and that
her odious husband was in fault. She won over a good many by bursting into tears
about her boy, and exhibiting the most frantic grief when his name was mentioned
or she saw anybody like him. She gained good Mrs. Alderney's heart in that way,
who was rather the Queen of British Boulogne, and gave the most dinners and
balls of all the residents there, by weeping when Master Alderney came from Dr.
Swishtail's academy to pass his holidays with his mother. »He and her Rawdon
