‘“Avec vot’ permission, madame,” said Louise coolly, speaking over Dorothy’s head. Without loosing her grasp on the legs, Dorothy glanced over her shoulder.
In the doorway, watching the scene with gaping mouths and excited, terrified, saucer-like eyes, stood Marie-Auguste and Alois. Behind them, like a Tower of Silence, stood the tall figure of Miss Carr. Nobody spoke.
Miss Carr nodded, judicially, once.
Louise gazed down contemplatively, almost fondly, at the vainly heaving body face down across her lap. Her hand advanced, found the ../buttons, and—to the accompaniment of a wild howl of despair from the region of the carpet—briskly drew down the white pants as far as mid-thigh. A seldom-observed portion of his Serene Highness came into general view…’

The House in St. John’s Wood is a beautifully-written epic of excitement, discipline and self-discovery (saluted by the London Literary Review as ‘highly moral in tone’) with dramas both expected and unexpected, mysterious foreign noblemen, armed and murderous Bolshevist fanatics, and above all the individual personalities to add depth and complexity to the story. Set in the London of the early 1920s, it is the tale of three unpleasant and arrogant royal adolescents, exiled from their inheritance in the turmoils succeeding the Great War, and, in order to fit them for the changed circumstances of their lives, sent (in secret) to England to learn good behaviour and modest deportment at the hands of the foremost lady disciplinarian of the day.