The second was the art class. The Reverend William Gilpin had not only been the loved and respected vicar of Boldre for two decades; he was also a notable artist, selling his drawings and paintings from time to time for charitable causes. Mrs Grockleton had purchased two and, soon afterwards, when Mr Gilpin arrived to award prizes in the academy, he was astonished to discover it was his own work that the young ladies were instructed to emulate or even copy. The vicar was no fool, but it was hard, after that, to refuse the invitation to deliver a lecture and take a class at the academy once a month; and in fact he rather enjoyed it.

So Mrs Grockleton's academy grew. Its growth, so far as Mrs Grockleton could manage, was spiral in form - starting with the better families in the town, then sweeping round those whose gentility had taken them to the environs and finally, circling ever wider, like a great, revolving seashell, she hoped to suck young ladies even from the distant manor houses of the gentry into the pleasant vortex of her establishment. Thus Miss Fanny Albion had already come to join her cousin Louisa Totton for the French classes - a triumph that had brought the academic huntress a deep joy - and no doubt there would be others. The one family she had hoped for, and which had so far eluded her, was that of Burrard.

The Burrards were very big in Lymington now. While the Tottons had remained, as it were, at the top of the town, the bolder and now much richer Burrards had long ago acquired a country estate called Walhampton, which lay on the other side of the river from Lymington. Their generations of marriages into gentry families like the Buttons had entirely established them in that class. But Lymington town was their base of operations and they ran the politics of the place. She had not yet managed to get past the Burrards' park gates. But one day, she felt sure, she would. Indeed, if all her hopes succeeded, it was inevitable that she must.