My Dear Lady Misericordia,
 
I hope this letter finds you well. It certainly does not leave me very well at all. I am sweaty, tired, and, more importantly, cramped up in the cupboard in the music room with a bassoon poking me in the ear. And why? Why am I shut in a cupboard ? The simple answer is that with the house so full of guests and so ablaze with lights and music and jollity for the Farewell Ball for your father's expedition, it was only private place I could find to write this letter.
 
However, I would hope, your ladyship, that, as your private tutor, I have taught you better than that. I would hope that you would be asking why I, Timothy Hope, find it necessary to climb into a cupboard in the middle of a ball to write you a letter, when I could just walk into the next room and speak to you in person and give Baronet Oxshott the chance to laugh in my face again.
 
But again, why? Why would the Baronet discharge his terrifying laugh at me? I who have done so much to help organise this evening? I who have helped your father Lord Daunt write his speech, I who have helped Professor Cumulus lay out his display of scientific instruments, I who have even, quite despite myself, helped the Baronet himself with his ridiculous illustrated lecture. Why? 

I suspect, my lady, that even upstairs in your dressing room this afternoon, you must have heard the Baronet's tantrum. I suspect most of the next county heard it. I suspect Northern Europe is alive with rumours of mysterious rumblings. We certainly heard it, Professor and Henrietta Cumulus and I. We all rushed to the drawing room to discover that Oxshott had broken the spirit lamp for his magic lantern. Apparently he does this often, being a man of small temper and large hands.
It was Henrietta Cumulus, the Professor's daughter, who suggested using one of the Professor's experimental incandescent electric bulbs for a light. That is a young lady, unlike some, who is not afraid to use the brain she was born with (and who, I might point out, does not require a whole day in which to get ready for a ball). The Professor himself pooh-poohed the idea, pointing out that there was not electrical power in the drawing room to light the thing with. It was then I had my idea.
I often wonder, my lady, just how aware you are of the life of the rest of Ghastington Manor. You often seem blithely unaware of anything outside the gossip of your friend Viscount Fox. But even you must have had some inkling of Professor Cumulus' Remarkable Velocipedal Dynamo. Perhaps not the Dynamo itself but you must have heard the Professor riding his bicycle about the ornamental garden after dark, ringing his bell and shrieking when he rode into rose bushes. The Professor, you see, has been experimenting with a device to power an electric light using the motion of a bicycle, thus allowing him to ride in the dark. Quite where the Professor is intending to go at night, I don't know, but he seems to find it important.

Anyway, you may even have noticed that the shrieking has got less over the last few days. You might even, if you have learned any of the scientific method I have been trying to teach you, be able to deduce that the Professor's Dynamo has worked and that he can now have bright, electrical light wherever he goes. And so, my lady, in case you were wondering (if you ever wonder about the antics of a humble tutor), that was how I came to be seated on a propped bicycle next to the magic lantern, pedaling away like a mad thing trying to keep the Dynamo whirling and the Baronet's bulb alight.
 
And for what? For one of the most dismal displays I have ever sat, let alone pedaled, through. Nothing but a series of photographs, often upside down or badly exposed, of the Baronet standing next to the dead carcass of some poor animal while he regaled us at length with the gruesome details of how he had killed it. Along with some inelegant description of whatever ghastly tropical disease he happened to be suffering from at the time. I have not spent a more disagreeable afternoon since the time I fell into the pig's sty and was not found until tea-time.
 
The fact that the Baronet kept comparing me, unfavourably, to a snorting Warthog or a puffing Gnu did not make the ordeal any more enjoyable, either. And yet you, my lady, appeared go fond it fascinating, hanging on the Baronet's every word. You certainly never displayed anything like as much interest in any of your lessons. Perhaps I might have taught you more if I'd been able to mimic the death rattle of an Okapi quite as convincingly, or explain in such excruciating detail quite how fiddly it is to skin a Panda.
 
I might have at least expected, then, some scrap of gratitude for everything I had done to help bring the lecture off. But perhaps that is too much for a humble private tutor to ask. It certainly seems you think so, for, as we were leaving the drawing room, you found the opportunity to remark upon how exciting and adventuresome the Baronet's life was, especially when compared to the timid and dull life of a private tutor. You continued, my Lady, to explain that while some men would only ever know the world from reading about it, real men go out into the world and, as far as I can tell, kill whatever they find there. Real men of the sort, as you pointed out, that young ladies dream of marrying.
 
And it was then that the Baronet chose to show his gratitude by laughing in my face.
 
I did not like having Baronet Oxshott laughing in my face: it sounded like a gun going off and I could see all his teeth. It was most disconcerting.
 
And that, my lady, is why I am currently crammed into a cupboard in the music room, squatting on a spinet, writing this letter to you. The amazing truth is, my lady, that after all these year of me trying to wedge at least a single scrap of learning onto your beautiful but regretfully still empty head, you have taught me something.
 
You have taught me that I am not the kind of man who hurries off into the wilderness to shoot at things, I am the kind of man who, after being laughed at by someone he has just done his utmost to help, instead of saying something clever or witty in reply, or even challenging that someone to a duel (which I would certainly lose), goes and hides in a cupboard and writes a letter. This letter.
 
I am precisely the kind of man, in fact, that young ladies do not marry. But I am the kind of man, your Ladyship, who can take a long, hard look at himself, and decide that he is going to change, that he is going to be a different kind of man, different to the way he was before, although also hopefully different to the other kind of man who laughed in the previous kind of man's face. The kind of man who decides not to be a timid and humble private tutor but who finishes his letter and goes into the ballroom to ask your ladyship to dance.
 
Yours, with sore legs and an empty dance card
 
Timothy Hope, Esq, Tutor