If Winefred could have said――I am a poor girl, I went about on the seashore collecting pebbles and grinding them, and glad to get a shilling for a good specimen, and my mother peddled tapes and buttons, I have had no more education than could be acquired in a Dame's school――then she would have experienced a sense of relief.
But this she could not do. Her father was a gentleman. She was being polished at his desire, and in fulfilment of her mother's ardent wishes. She was no longer poor, but her mother must ever remain illiterate and excluded from the class into which she, Winefred, was to be introduced. Nor was this all that troubled her. She was in uncertainty as to the actual position of that mother whom she idolised; consequently she was in doubt as to her own.
If her mother had been really married, then Winefred had a perfect right to the name she bore, but it was a mistake for her mother not to carry the same. But if the marriage had been invalid, then she herself was guilty of imposition in assuming a name to which she had no title. In many ways she was sailing under false pretences. Her situation was full of difficulties and productive of embarrassment. To shield her mother, she could not speak of her as her mother; she was constrained to accept the fable that she was her nurse. She was impelled into a course of equivocation and half-truths against which her conscience rebelled.
Were it to leak out that Mrs. Marley actually was her mother, what looks would be exchanged, and how precipitate would be her expulsion from the house! For herself she would not care. But she was aware that her mother's ambition was to see her a lady, and this was a necessary step towards that goal. Were she by her conduct or admissions to forfeit her place there, it would make her mother's heart bitter with disappointment. Moreover, she had been led to believe that she was put with Mrs. Tomkin-Jones at her father's desire, and deep in her heart lay the longing desire that she might be the means at some future time of bringing him and her mother together once more. If that consummation were to be obtained, it could only be through fidelity in carrying out their common desire.
She had tact, and yet was in fear of betraying her ignorance, transferred suddenly as she was from one social element into another. When she did make a blunder it involved an elaborate apology and explanation on the part of Mrs. Tomkin-Jones to such as had witnessed the error, and this wounded her to the quick.