"You'll like him, Herminia," Mrs. Dewsbury said, nodding. "He's

one of your own kind, as dreadful as you are; very free and

advanced; a perfect firebrand. In fact, my dear child, I don't

know which of you makes my hair stand on end most." And with that

introductory hint, she left the pair forthwith to their own

devices.

Mrs. Dewsbury was right. It took those two but little time to feel

quite at home with one another. Built of similar mould, each

seemed instinctively to grasp what each was aiming at. Two or

three turns pacing up and down the lawn, two or three steps along

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the box-covered path at the side, and they read one another

perfectly. For he was true man, and she was real woman.

"Then you were at Girton?" Alan asked, as he paused with one hand

on the rustic seat that looks up towards Leith Hill, and the

heather-clad moorland.

"Yes, at Girton," Herminia answered, sinking easily upon the bench,

and letting one arm rest on the back in a graceful attitude of

unstudied attention. "But I didn't take my degree," she went on

hurriedly, as one who is anxious to disclaim some too great honor

thrust upon her. "I didn't care for the life; I thought it

cramping. You see, if we women are ever to be free in the world,

we must have in the end a freeman's education. But the education

at Girton made only a pretence at freedom. At heart, our girls

were as enslaved to conventions as any girls elsewhere. The whole

object of the training was to see just how far you could manage to

push a woman's education without the faintest danger of her

emancipation."

"You are right," Alan answered briskly, for the point was a pet one

with him. "I was an Oxford man myself, and I know that servitude.

When I go up to Oxford now and see the girls who are being ground

in the mill at Somerville, I'm heartily sorry for them. It's worse

for them than for us; they miss the only part of university life

that has educational value. When we men were undergraduates, we

lived our whole lives, lived them all round, developing equally

every fibre of our natures. We read Plato, and Aristotle, and John

Stuart Mill, to be sure,--and I'm not quite certain we got much

good from them; but then our talk and thought were not all of

books, and of what we spelt out in them. We rowed on the river, we

played in the cricket-field, we lounged in the billiard-rooms, we

ran up to town for the day, we had wine in one another's rooms

after hall in the evening, and behaved like young fools, and threw

oranges wildly at one another's heads, and generally enjoyed

ourselves. It was all very silly and irrational, no doubt, but it

was life, it was reality; while the pretended earnestness of those

pallid Somerville girls is all an affectation of one-sided

culture."




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