On usage ancient and modern being meant (by Forest, not by Nicola), I'd wager my shirt on it. It's an interesting moment, isn't it: Nicola acknowledging--perhaps a bit ruefully--the Marlow reputation, and Miranda, embarrassed by her gaffe over the 'dreggy uniform dress', really steaming in and stomping on poor old Sandra, while Wendy Tredgold bitches away impotently in the background. While it's all beautifully orchestrated and in that sense enjoyable, I end up feeling very uncomfortable at the power and status relations there.

Miss Keith's levelling spirit has got her in a bit of a bind here, too, I sense. On the one hand, it's a very Keithian bit of waste-not-want-not common sense to allow the Marlows to persist in reach-me-downs forever, but it ends up reinforcing a special status that her communitarian instincts presumably revolt from, not least because there might be a recognition at work that the Marlows can take what would for anyone else might be socially shaming and turn it about into a 'privilege'. I wonder if there's some unconscious hostility playing out there in her subsequent treatment of Nicola in this novel.