Therefore, when she persuades the Baronet to spend a week in the little house on Curzon Street, even Thackeray admits that she is sincerely happy to have him there. She comes bustling and blushing into his room with a scuttle of coals; she cooks excellent dishes for his dinner; she gives him Lord Steyne’s White Hermitage to warm his frozen blood, telling him it is a cheap wine which Rawdon has picked up in France; she sits by his side in the firelight, stitching a shirt for her little son; she plays every detail of her part with the careful and conscientious art of a Dutch painter composing a domestic scene; and she asks no unreasonable return for her labours. Rawdon, who does nothing, is disgusted because his brother gives them no money; but Rebecca, who does everything, is content with credit. Sir Pitt, as the head of the family, is the corner-stone upon which she rears the fabric of her social life. The exact degree of Becky’s innocence and guilt is a matter of slight importance. There is no goodness in her to be spoiled or saved. To try to soften our judgment by pleading one or two acts of contemptuous kindness is absurd. Her qualities are great qualities: valour, and wit, and audacity, and patience, and an ungrumbling acceptance of fate. No one recognizes these qualities except Lord Steyne, who has a greatness of his own. It will be remembered that on one occasion he gives Rebecca eleven hundred pounds to discharge her indebtedness to Miss Briggs; and subsequently discovers that the amount due the “sheep-dog” is six hundred pounds, and that Rebecca has been far too thrifty to pay any of it out of the sum bestowed on her for that purpose. He is not angry at being outwitted, as a small and stupid man would have been. He is charmed. “His lordship’s admiration for Becky rose immeasurably at this proof of her cleverness. Getting the money was nothing--but getting double the sum she wanted, and paying nobody--it was a magnificent stroke. ‘What an accomplished little devil it is!’ he thought. ‘She beats all the women I have ever seen in the course of my well-spent life. They are babies compared to her. I am a green-horn myself, and a fool in her hands--an old fool. She is unsurpassable in lies.’” With which testimony, candid, fervent, and generous withal, Becky’s case can be considered closed. Discredited, humiliated, and punished in the irrepressible interests of morality, she is left stranded amid life’s minor respectabilities which must have irked her sorely; but which Thackeray plainly considered to be far beyond her merits. I hope it comforts her in that shadowy land where dwell the immortals of fiction to know that her shameless little figure, flitting dauntlessly from venture to venture, from hazard to hazard, has never been without appreciative observers. I had almost said appreciative and pitying observers; but Becky’s is the last ghost in Christendom whom I should dare to affront with pity.