'Oh, fie, Mr Grockleton,' said his wife cheerfully. And a moment later she was off again, explaining her plans for the future.

You could say what you liked about Mrs Grockleton, but she was never idle. She had not been a month in Lymington when she saw that it had need of an academy for young ladies; and since it happened that a lease was available on the big brick house next to their own, which lay a little way past the church at the top of the High Street, she had persuaded her husband to take it and here she had set up her establishment.

She had been skilful. First she had secured the mayor's daughter and her best friend whose father, an attorney, belonged to a landed family in the next county. Next she had gone to the Tottons. They lived nowadays in a handsome house just apart from the town. Although Mr Totton was certainly involved in the town's trade, his sister had married old Mr Albion of Albion House, so the young Tottons and Miss Albion were cousins. Edward Totton was up at Oxford. When Louisa Totton was snared, therefore, Mrs Grockleton could reasonably feel that this advanced the academy into the sphere of the local gentry. At the apex of the merchant families was another, more recently arrived in the area: Mr St Barbe gave his business as grocer, salt and coal merchant, but he was a most gentlemanly and philanthropic man, a pillar of the community. One of the St Barbe girls was duly obtained. Within a few months, by allowing some girls to come for only certain lessons and others, from further off, to board there, Mrs Grockleton had drifted almost twenty young ladies into her academic corral.

The academy had two features of which she was particularly proud. It taught French, which was done by herself. She had acquired this fashionable accomplishment quite humbly as a girl from a French dressmaker in Bristol, but her fluency certainly reinforced her claims to social authority in Lymington. And while a command of French would undoubtedly be an asset to any of the daughters of Lymington merchants who wanted to shine in the great London houses or the courts of Europe, it was surely an inducement that they could also practise upon the charming young French officers who had recently been stationed in the town.