of parenthood.  But Dolly’s own development rendered all such steps futile.  There is no more silly and persistent error than the belief of parents that they can influence to any appreciable extent the moral ideas and impulses of their children.  These things have their springs in the bases of character:  they are the flower of individuality; and they cannot be altered or affected after birth by the foolishness of preaching.  Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old, you will find soon enough he will choose his own course for himself and depart from it.

Already when Dolly was a toddling little mite and met her mother’s father in the church in Marylebone, it had struck her as odd that while they themselves were so poor and ill-clad, her grandpapa should be such a grand old gentleman of such a dignified aspect.  As she grew older and older, and began to understand a little more the world she lived in, she wondered yet more profoundly how it could happen, if her grandpapa was indeed the Very Reverend, the Dean of Dunwich, that her mamma should be an outcast from her father’s church, and scarcely well seen in the best carriage company.  She had learnt that deans are rather grand people—­almost as much so as admirals; that they wear shovel-hats to distinguish them from the common ruck of rectors; that they lived in fine houses in a cathedral close; and that they drive in a victoria with a coachman in livery.  So much essential knowledge of the church of Christ she had gained for herself by personal observation; for facts like these were what interested Dolly.  She couldn’t understand, then, why she and her mother should live precariously in a very small attic; should never be visited by her mother’s brothers, one of whom she knew to be a Prebendary of Old Sarum, while the other she saw gazetted as a Colonel of Artillery; and should be totally ignored by her mother’s sister, Ermyntrude, who lolled in a landau down the sunny side of Bond Street.

At first, indeed, it only occurred to Dolly that her mother’s extreme and advanced opinions had induced a social breach between herself and the orthodox members of her family.  Even that Dolly resented; why should mamma hold ideas of her own which shut her daughter out from the worldly advantages enjoyed to the full by the rest of her kindred?  Dolly had no particular religious ideas; the subject didn’t interest her; and besides, she thought the New Testament talked about rich and poor in much the same unpractical nebulous way that mamma herself did—­in fact, she regarded it with some veiled contempt as a rather sentimental radical publication.  But, she considered, for all that, that it was probably true enough as far as the facts and the theology went; and she couldn’t understand why a person like mamma should cut herself off contumaciously from the rest of the world by presuming to disbelieve a body of doctrine which so many rich and well-gaitered bishops held worthy of credence.