Coelebs by Ethel Mills

Miss Peggy Annersley was a niece of Mr Chadwick, one of a family of four girls whom Fate had deprived of their mother in early childhood, and, as though repenting the evil turn she had wrought them, had remedied the ill as far as she was able by subsequently removing their father also from a world in which, though undoubtedly ornamental, he was not of the slightest use. Having freed them thus far from the only obstacle in the path of any possible success which might fall to their lot, she threw them with light-hearted irresponsibility and an air of having finished with them, if not finally, at least for the time being, into the care of the wealthy uncle who, being childless, was naturally the person best fitted to undertake the charge of four well-grown, unruly, under-educated girls. Mr Chadwick sent them forthwith to a good boarding-school, and, like Fate, having disposed of them temporarily, dismissed them from his thoughts.

But Mr Chadwick was possessed of a wife, and that wife was possessed of ideas regarding the race in general and the feminine half of it in particular; she therefore shouldered his neglected responsibilities and made the education of those four girls her special study.