About four in the afternoon, the girls reached their destination; rather tired out by their long ride, but, nevertheless, in excellent spirits. Miss Stiefbach, after a few remarks as to the propriety of being a day before, rather than an hour behind time, dismissed them to their rooms to prepare for supper, where for the present we will leave them.
Miss Stiefbach and her sister Christine, were two excellent German ladies who, owing to a sudden reverse of fortune, were obliged to leave their mother-country, hoping to find means of supporting themselves in America. They were most kindly received by the gentlemen to whom they brought letters of introduction, and with their assistance they had been able to open a school for young ladies; and now, at the end of seven years, they found themselves free from debt, and at the head of one of the best boarding-schools in the United States.
Miss Stiefbach, the head and director of the establishment, was a stern, cold, forbidding woman; acting on what she considered to be the most strictly conscientious principles, but never unbending in the slightest degree her frigid, repelling manner. To look at her was enough to have told you her character at once. She was above the medium height, excessively thin and angular in her figure, and was always dressed in some stiff material, which, as Marion Berkley expressed it, "looked as if it had been starched and frozen, and had never been thawed out."
Miss Christine was fifteen years her junior, and her exact opposite in appearance as well as in disposition: she was short and stout, and rosy-cheeked, not at all pretty; but having such a kind smile, such a thoroughly good-natured face, that the girls all thought she was really beautiful, and would feel more repentance at one of her grieved looks, than they would for forty of Miss Stiefbach's frigid reprimands. And well they might love her, for she certainly was a kind friend to them. Many a school-girl trick or frolic had she concealed, which, if it had come under the searching eyes of her sister, would have secured the perpetrators as stern a rebuke, and perhaps as severe a punishment, as if they had committed some great wrong.
Miss Stiefbach's school was by no means what is generally called a "fashionable school." The parents of the young girls who went there wished that their daughters should receive not only a sound education, but that they should be taught many useful things not always included in the list of a young lady's accomplishments.