Finishing school

"All she needs is a year or two at a fashionable finishing school, so that at eighteen she can come out with éclat," put in Aunt Clara.

Until the 1920s, most European high schools for girls were finishing schools.

On the advice of a well-heeled friend from Indonesia, she then decamped to Switzerland to attend the Institut Villa Pierrefeu. “They call it ‘the finishing school that refuses to be finished,’” Ms. Ho explained, the last in a dying form of pedagogy that asks wealthy women to scrutinize the folds in napkins with an intensity akin to Watson and Crick studying the double helix.