All stylish society accepted the tenets of the Church of England.  But in time it began to occur to her that there might be some deeper and, as she herself would have said, more disgraceful reason for her mother’s alienation from so respectable a family.  For to Dolly, that was disgraceful which the world held to be so.  Things in themselves, apart from the world’s word, had for her no existence.  Step by step, as she grew up to blushing womanhood, it began to strike her with surprise that her grandfather’s name had been, like her own, Barton.  “Did you marry your cousin, mamma?” she asked Herminia one day quite suddenly.

And Herminia, flushing scarlet at the unexpected question, the first with which Dolly had yet ventured to approach that dangerous quicksand, replied with a deadly thrill, “No, my darling.  Why do you ask me?”

“Because,” Dolly answered abashed, “I just wanted to know why your name should be Barton, the same as poor grandpapa’s.”

Herminia didn’t dare to say too much just then.  “Your dear father,” she answered low, “was not related to me in any way.”

Dolly accepted the tone as closing the discussion for the present; but the episode only strengthened her underlying sense of a mystery somewhere in the matter to unravel.

In time, Herminia sent her child to a day-school.  Though she had always taught Dolly herself as well as she was able, she felt it a matter of duty, as her daughter grew up, to give her something more than the stray ends of time in a busy journalist’s moments of leisure.  At the school, where Dolly was received without question, on Miss Smith-Water’s recommendation, she found herself thrown much into the society of other girls, drawn for the most part from the narrowly Mammon-worshipping ranks of London professional society.  Here, her native tendencies towards the real religion of England, the united worship of Success and Respectability, were encouraged to the utmost.  But she noticed at times with a shy shrinking that some few of the girls had heard vague rumors about her mother as a most equivocal person, who didn’t accept all the current superstitions, and were curious to ask her questions as to her family and antecedents.  Crimson with shame, Dolly parried such enquiries as best she could; but she longed all the more herself to pierce this dim mystery.  Was it a runaway match?—­with the groom, perhaps, or the footman?  Only the natural shamefacedness of a budding girl in prying into her mother’s most domestic secrets prevented Dolores from asking Herminia some day point-blank all about it.

But she was gradually becoming aware that some strange atmosphere of doubt surrounded her birth and her mother’s history.  It filled her with sensitive fears and self-conscious hesitations.