Her mother "bad," indeed! If so,
then what was the meaning of goodness? For poor Lotty's devotion to
the child had received its due reward herein, that she was loved as
purely and intensely as any most virtuous parent could hope to be;
so little regard has nature for social codes, so utterly is she
often opposed to all the precepts of respectability. This phrase of
Harriet's was the very first breathing against her mother's
character that Ida had ever heard. Lotty had invented fables, for
the child's amusement, about her own earlier days. The legend was,
that her husband had died about a year after marriage. Of course Ida
implicitly believed all this. Her mind contained pictures of a
beautiful little house just outside London in which her mother had
once lived, and her imagination busied itself with the time when
they would both live in just that same way. She was going to be a
teacher, so it had been decided in confidential chats, and would one
day have a school of her own. In such a future Lotty herself really
believed. The child seemed to her extraordinarily clover, and in
four more years she would be as old as a girl who had assisted with
the little ones in the first school she went to.
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