Within a week she was teaching this girl how to read. They'd work on 
letters for a while and then wander off into more stories about Princess Nell, 
stop in the middle for a quick practical demonstration of basic math, return to 
the story, and then get sidetracked with an endless chain of "why this?" and 
"why that?" Miranda had spent a lot of time with kiddie ractives, both as a 
child and as a governess, and the superiority of this thing was 
palpable—like hefting an antique silver fork when you'd been eating with 
plastic utensils for twenty years, or slithering into a tailor-made evening 
gown when you were used to jeans.