A new girl arrives at an English boarding school in mid-term, is placed in a form of older pupils, and has to find out for herself what the rules actually are. The school story of this period ran on such arrivals; what distinguishes this one is the amount of ordinary school work in it. The friendships are made and broken over small things, exactly as they are at that age. Fifty-six plates of nineteenth-century painting, from Wilkie's crowded interiors to Sisley's riverside views, catch the same small dramas of ordinary life that fill Barbara's first term.
