She had stuck bravely to the abridgments and the juvenile scraps of -- ologies, and had been altogether a model of propriety, sewing on such a number of strings and buttons during the period as can only be compassed by the maternal mind.

Her existence had been by no means as joyless or desolate as such an existence is generally represented by the writer of fiction.

There was plenty of life and bustle in the big prosperous boarding-school, if there was not much variety.

There were small scandals and small intrigues; departures and arrivals; wonderful hampers of cake and wine to be divided among the elect of a fashionable dormitory--for there is as wide a difference between the tone and status of the bedrooms in a ladies'-school as between the squares of Berkeley and Bedford.

There were breaking-up parties, and the free-and-easy idleness of the holidays, when a few dark-complexioned girls from the colonies, a yellow-haired damsel from the remote north of Scotland, and Miss Diana Paget, were wont to cluster round the fire in the smaller of the schoolrooms to tell ghost-stories or talk scandal in the gloaming.
It was a life which, taken with all its small hardships and petty annoyances, should have been as the life of Paradise compared to that which Diana had led with her father and Mr.Hawkehurst.Whether the girl fully appreciated the change from the Bohemianism of her late existence to the respectability of Hyde Lodge was a question which no one had asked of her.