It did not take Mrs Burford long to find this out. She said (with perfect truth) that Tiffany had been ruined by indulgence; there was nothing for it but to send her to school.

So Tiffany was packed off to Miss Climping’s Seminary in Bath, to be tamed, and transformed from a tomboy into an accomplished young lady.

Unfortunately, Miss Climping’s establishment included a number of day-pupils, with whom Tiffany soon struck up friendships. She was permitted to visit them, and once outside the seminary considerably extended her circle of acquaintances. It was not until a billet from a lovelorn youth, addressed to Tiffany, and smuggled into the house by a venial servant, fell into Miss Climping’s hands that the good lady realized that the unexceptionable visits to schoolfriends masked far from desirable excursions; or that a girl not yet sixteen could embark on a clandestine love-affair. Tiffany was a valuable pupil, her trustees paying for every extra on the curriculum without a blink; but had it not been for one circumstance Miss Climping would have requested Mr Burford to remove from her select establishment a firebrand who threatened to ruin its reputation. That was the arrival, to assume the duties of a junior teacher, of Ancilla Trent, herself a one-time pupil at the school. Bored by the reproaches and the homilies of what she called a parcel of old dowdies, Tiffany took an instant fancy to the new teacher, who was only eight years older than herself, and in whose clear gray eyes she was swift to detect a twinkle. It did not take her long to discover that however straitened her circumstances might be Ancilla came of a good family, and had been used to move in unquestionably genteel circles. She recognized, and was a little awed by, a certain elegance which owed nothing to Ancilla’s simple dresses; and bit by bit she began to lend an ear to such scraps of worldly advice as Ancilla let fall at seasonable moments.