The sisters, Miss Stella and Miss Clara, Miss Lucy and Miss Marianne, did their own teaching, and did it in a perfectly unconventional way to the twenty or so girls who made up their school.
When Nelly came home to her father at seventeen years of age, it would not have been easy to find a fresher, franker specimen of young girlhood.

In fact, to her father's eyes she was somewhat alarmingly bright and fair.
"The young fellows will be about her thick as bees," he said to himself in a frightened way.

"I won't have any nonsense about Nelly.

I want my girl to myself for a little while.

Afterwards there is that arrangement of the Dowager's about Nelly and Robin.