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McTavish. There remained but the hair, a Brillo pad of light brown curls that suggested a chubby Harpo Marx. It vexed the headmistress to see new strands of grey around the temples. While too numerous to pluck, these could still be concealed with an artful application of shoe polish administered by means of a deft wrist and her favourite old toothbrush.
    But before the Merlin of makeup could work her magic, she was overcome. Eyebrows twitched, jowls shook, and tears poured down her cheeks, smudging, eroding, and generally playing havoc with her carefully constructed mask. Quite naturally, the waterworks flowed from the remembrance of her father. Not of his death, mind, but of the terrible secret she’d discovered in its wake. A secret that this Mary Mabel scandal threatened to expose:
    Miss Horatia Alice Bentwhistle was bankrupt.
    The Crash — more smelling salts — had destroyed not only the widows’ mites, but the Bentwhistle family fortune, as well. Horatio had concealed the ruin (“Deny and contain!”), the power of his reputation sufficient to mesmerize creditors. But with his death, Miss Bentwhistle had found herself alone, faced with a mountain of debt against which she had but her name and her Academy. Both were in immediate jeopardy.
    Privileges conferred by her name would disappear if she were known to be insolvent. Therefore, the Bentwhistle Academy had to be milked to pay down debt. At the same time, the Academy’s pedigree, the Bentwhistle name, had to be maintained, lest wealthy clients send their heirs to more reputable havens. Maintaining her name, in turn, meant maintaining a facade of wealth, which in turn meant increasing the flow of the very red ink she was desperate to staunch.
    The poor have no understanding of true financial need , Miss Bentwhistle thought, weeping. They require tens and twenties, while I require thousands. Life is so unfair.
    To forestall talk, she dropped references to foreign accounts, and hosted a dizzying array of occasions. She also embarked on a recruitment drive to enroll more students to generate more funds to pay for more parties to polish a name designed to attract more students to generate more funds and so forth. It was a vicious circle, all the more desperate as Hard Times had wiped out much of her potential clientele. Like Scarlett O’Hara, Miss Bentwhistle resolved to think about that tomorrow.
    London was too small a pond in which to fish for additional students, so Miss Bentwhistle poached in the exclusive waterways of Toronto. It was a daring long shot. The nation’s navel had an ample supply of private schools, capable of conferring social status without the financial drain obliged by boarding.
    Despite this drawback, Miss Bentwhistle pressed ahead. She knew from personal experience that the rich were habitually bored, and that bored rich adolescents had even more opportunity to get into trouble than their downtrodden counterparts. Consequently, she used her Toronto contacts to ferret out the names of well-heeled families with delinquent daughters. To these, she sent an illustrated brochure touting the Academy’s high moral tone and academic standards, as well as its commitment to Christian redemption and reasonable rates.
    Toronto’s troubled bloodlines took the bait. At the very least, ensconced a good three hours drive from the city, their adolescents would no longer embarrass the family by rolling in drunk at 4:00 a.m., sans panties, to throw up on the shrubbery. Here was a chance to ditch their headaches while keeping their heads held high.
    The Academy prospered financially. Its academic standards, however, sustained significant collateral damage. This could have been stickhandled without tears if only Miss Bentwhistle’s teachers had been as clever with their mark books as she was with her bank books. Unhappily, they were a linear lot who failed to grasp that while standards are all well and good, it’s the appearance of standards that