In later years her milkmaid freshness owed, perhaps, something to this upbringing.
Later, she went to school.

Sir Gerald's widow, to whom Sir Denis always referred as the Dowager, who had taken an unasked-for interest in the motherless child from her birth, had found the ideal school for Nelly--a school where the daughters of the aristocracy were kept in a conventual seclusion while they learnt as little as might be of the simpler virtues, but a deal of the way to step in and out of a carriage, to comport themselves with dignity, to bear themselves in the presence of their sovereign, and so on.
Sir Denis, who had not been consulted, made a pretence of interviewing the Misses de Crespigny, by whom this aristocratic preserve was safeguarded.
He had listened to Miss Selina de Crespigny's eloquent exposition of the system adopted at De Crespigny House.

Then he had torn it all to pieces as one might the delicate fabric of a spider's web, constructed at infinite cost.
"And, tell me now, do you teach them to be good daughters and wives and mothers ?" he asked, with his air of convincing simplicity.

"Do you teach them their duties to their husbands and children, ma'am, may I ask ?" Miss de Crespigny positively gasped.

There was an indelicacy about the General's speech, to her manner of thinking.
"We expect our young ladies' mothers to teach them all that," she said, stiffly.
"And they don't.