From a very early age, indeed, this false note in Dolly had begun to make itself heard.  While she was yet quite a child, Herminia noticed with a certain tender but shrinking regret that Dolly seemed to attach undue importance to the mere upholsteries and equipages of life,—­to rank, wealth, title, servants, carriages, jewelry.  At first, to be sure, Herminia hoped this might prove but the passing foolishness of childhood:  as Dolly grew up, however, it became clearer each day that the defect was in the grain—­that Dolly’s whole mind was incurably and congenitally aristocratic or snobbish.  She had that mean admiration for birth, position, adventitious advantages, which is the mark of the beast in the essentially aristocratic or snobbish nature.  She admired people because they were rich, because they were high-placed, because they were courted, because they were respected; not because they were good, because they were wise, because they were noble-natured, because they were respect-worthy.

But even that was not all.  In time, Herminia began to perceive with still profounder sorrow that Dolly had no spontaneous care or regard for righteousness.  Right and wrong meant to her only what was usual and the opposite.  She seemed incapable of considering the intrinsic nature of any act in itself apart from the praise or blame meted out to it by society.  In short, she was sunk in the same ineffable slough of moral darkness as the ordinary inhabitant of the morass of London.

To Herminia this slow discovery, as it dawned bit by bit upon her, put the final thorn in her crown of martyrdom.  The child on whose education she had spent so much pains, the child whose success in the deep things of life was to atone for her own failure, the child who was born to be the apostle of freedom to her sisters in darkness, had turned out in the most earnest essentials of character a complete disappointment, and had ruined the last hope that bound her to existence.

Bitterer trials remained.  Herminia had acted through life to a great extent with the idea ever consciously present to her mind that she must answer to Dolly for every act and every feeling.  She had done all she did with a deep sense of responsibility.  Now it loomed by degrees upon her aching heart that Dolly’s verdict would in almost every case be a hostile one.  The daughter was growing old enough to question and criticise her mother’s proceedings; she was beginning to understand that some mysterious difference marked off her own uncertain position in life from the solid position of the children who surrounded her—­the children born under those special circumstances which alone the man-made law chooses to stamp with the seal of its recognition.  Dolly’s curiosity was shyly aroused as to her dead father’s family.  Herminia had done her best to prepare betimes for this inevitable result by setting before her child, as soon as she could understand it, the true moral doctrine as to the duties