The tables and chairs were put away in rows, like figures in a sum; fires were so rarely lighted in the rooms of ceremony, that they felt like wells, and a visitor represented the bucket; the dining-room seemed the last place in the world where any eating or drinking was likely to occur; there was no sound through all the house but the ticking of a great clock in the hall, which made itself audible in the very garrets; and sometimes a dull cooing of young gentlemen at their lessons, like the murmurings of an assemblage of melancholy pigeons.
Miss Blimber, too, although a slim and graceful maid, did no soft violence to the gravity of the house.

There was no light nonsense about Miss Blimber.

She kept her hair short and crisp, and wore spectacles.
She was dry and sandy with working in the graves of deceased languages.
None of your live languages for Miss Blimber.

They must be dead--stone dead--and then Miss Blimber dug them up like a Ghoul.
Mrs Blimber, her Mama, was not learned herself, but she pretended to be, and that did quite as well.

She said at evening parties, that if she could have known Cicero, she thought she could have died contented.