Sublime

Grace Macaulay, then: seventeen, small and plump, with skin that went brown by the end of May. Her hair was black and oily, and had the hot consoling scent of an animal in summer. She disliked books, and was by nature a thief if she found a thing to be beautiful, but not hers. She didn’t know she couldn’t sing. She was inclined to be cross.

And if it was for any sort of a fine handsome woman, but for a little fistful of a woman like Kitty Keary, that’s not four feet high hardly, and not three teeth in her head unless she got new ones!

Allenwood was in some respects the female equivalent of Groton: a pioneering school that offered the daughters of England’s elite a liberal education emphasizing social responsibility and personal independence.

I would have a rest this afternoon, for Winifred had gone back to the vicarage and was comforting Julian. I felt a little sorry for him, surrounded as he would be by excellent women. But at least he would be safe from people like Mrs Gray; Sister Blatt would defend him fiercely against all such perils, I knew. Perhaps it might after all be my duty

I discovered her. Charmante, a perfect Gretchen,4 and we’ve already become acquainted. The prettiest little thing, really!’

Mrs Lemon’s school, the chief school in the county, where the teaching included all that was demanded in the accomplished female – even to extras, such as the getting in and out of a carriage.

a lady of admirable good-nature and good temper, much liked by every one who knew her, and of those ample architectural proportions that in women who are not duchesses are described by contemporary historians as stoutness.