The girl was not reconciled to her surroundings. She had begun to doubt her adaptability to them; she was low-spirited, and perplexed as to her course. At moments she felt that she would have been less uncomfortable at Axmouth. The gibes of the village girls would have been less intolerable than the patronage of Mrs. Tomkin-Jones. The envy of the rustics was a recognition of superiority, and consequently flattering to her pride, whereas the condescension of the doctor's widow impressed on her a sense of inferiority, and that an inferiority on an uncertain stage. At Axmouth she at all events felt the ground under her feet. Here, at Bath, she did not touch ground at all. She was like one of those glass imps in a water bottle that goes to the bottom at a touch on the elastic cover of the vessel, and the thumb of Mrs. T.-J. was much employed in depressing her. 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.