A lady who was standing apart came forward to join in the talk. She was a Frenchwoman, over fifty, with a sallow, clever face, and sad brown eyes which lighted with her smile; who had led a difficult life in the land of her forced adoption, and lived with its daughters, feeling that she owed it no gratitude.
“I imagine most of us had that experience at an early stage for such power of metaphor to be born,” she said.
“I did not mean the metaphors to be quoted from childish reflections,” said Miss Cliff. “I was putting a childish experience into unchildish language. But I remember the experience itself so well. It marks off a chapter in my life for me.”
“Yes; we have so much faith as children,” said the remaining member of the band. “I daresay we could all mark off the chapters in our lives by loss of faith in something. We have to guard against losing faith in too many things.”
The speaker was Miss Adam, the lecturer in history — younger than the others, and young for her youth; with her zeal for the world where she had her life, not untempered by a wistfulness on the world outside, and her faith in the creed of her nurture as untouched by any of the usual shattering forces, as by her special knowledge of its growth.
“It seems we can mark age by steps in scepticism,” said Miss Lemaître. “It would be a help to our curiosity on both, to remember they correspond.”
“It would be a very good way of guessing people’s ages,” said Miss Greenlow, with her inappropriate plaintiveness. “We should simply have to start some disputed topics; and having discovered the doubted points, calculate the chapters marked off.”
“We shall have to warn people to be wary in conversing with Miss Greenlow,” said Miss Cliff.
“She always has told us that all things can be reduced to mathematics, if enough is known about them,” said Miss Butler.
“Well, perhaps we are abusing flippancy,” said Miss Cliff, observing Miss Adam’s silence. “I suppose it is true, after all, that the youngest-natured people are those who keep their beliefs in things; and we should try to keep youthful in nature, I suppose.”
“Youthfulness of nature does not depend upon convictions, surely, speaking seriously,” said Miss Lemaître. “Convictions are a matter of intellect; and our intellects have little to do with our characters.”
“That is a little dogmatic, is it not? “said Miss Butler, who was not very fond of Miss Lemaître. “Our intellects must influence our ways of looking at things and people, and our apprehension of them.”
“Yes, yes; I think they must,” said Miss Cliff; “and our ways of looking at people especially. In our dealings with each other, faith is often another word for charity.”
“Yes, very often,” said Miss Adam; “and charity for faith.”
“That is coming rather near to heresy, I am afraid,” said Miss Lemaître. “Is not the relative value of those qualities settled for us? I am not sure that their interchangeability is doctrinal.”
“No,” said Miss Greenlow, shaking her head; “it smells badly of schism.”
“Miss Adam meant the word ‘faith’ to be understood in a general, not a particular sense,” said Miss Butler.
“I should not have supposed that any of us meant anything,” said Miss Lemaître.
“It is rather a philosophic subject for so soon after luncheon,” said Miss Dorrington.
“I know that the time of day is said to breed mental inertia,” said Miss Cliff; “but I am constrained to the dubious course of spending it in reading essays. You must excuse my desertion of my post: my pupils have increased. Miss Dorrington, you will succeed me, I am sure?”
“Deplorable irregularity on the part of one in office!” said Miss Butler, as Miss Dorrington changed her position willingly and clumsily.
“The students are increasing very quickly,” said Miss Greenlow. “I don’t know what the opponents of women’s higher education would say to it.”
“I imagine that class has resigned its delusion, that anything can be said for its view,” said Miss Butler, with the casual manner which covers strong feeling; while Miss Cliff, arrested by the subject, paused with her hand on the door.
“Oh no, they cling to it,” said Miss Lemaître, carelessly. “I was listening to two old clergymen talking the other day; and they were agreeing that learning unfitted women for the sphere for which they were fitted by nature and their life through the centuries, with all things included — I believe to the corroboration of Genesis.”
“It is such a quaint argument — that women must not do a thing, because they have not done it before,” said Miss Dorrington, who had yet to take of a subject an other than genial view.
“We are not to try the water till we have learned to swim,” Miss Butler said, in a slightly different spirit.
“Oh, well, they were old,” said Miss Adam. “People can hardly be expected to give up the notions they were bred up in, at the end of their lives.”
“And parsons as well,” said Miss Lemaître; which further light upon the insufficiency shown, Miss Adam gave no sign of accepting.
“But I suppose there is something in the argument, that women must be what the development of ages has made them,” she resumed.
“I think very little,” said Miss Butler. “You see, women are not descended only from women. Their heritage is from their fathers as much as their mothers. The development of one sex does not bear only upon that sex.”
“A very good point,” said Miss Cliff from the door; “and one that is not made enough of.”
“Yes, there is truth in that,” said Miss Adam. “But does not the life of one sex, carried on through generations, influence that sex? Do not some qualities go down in the female line and others in the male? In the evolution of any creature, is not that so?”
“The historian looks across the ages, as the heir of all of them,” said Miss Butler, taking refuge in jest where she found it hard to keep cool. “Now I think of it, the lioness does not carry a mane in spite of her shaggy forefathers.”
“She may owe much to her forefathers, nevertheless,” said Miss Cliff. “We must not confuse the physical attributes of one sex, with the mental and moral part which is transmitted from both to both, and which the others hardly bear upon. We have known women like their fathers, though they did not carry beards. But to leave the sphere of science — to our brothers, if Miss Adam wills, — and take a practical view; the women of civilised countries outnumber the men; and as a proportion cannot marry, there must be a class of self-supporting women.”
“Unless polygamy becomes an institution,” said Miss Greenlow, the union of her manner and matter producing general hilarity.
“And even if they do marry,” said Miss Butler, “why should learning unfit them for domestic duties? I suppose people think, if we heard a child screaming, we should wait to rub up Aristotle on the training of the young, before going to see what was troubling it. I have never seen evidence that learning has that effect. I am sure my cousin, Professor Butler, is the most erudite person, in mind and appearance, I have known; but to see his antics before his baby daughter, when she is at the point of decision between crying and not crying, is to lose faith for ever in the theory, that learning is prejudicial to domestic ability.”
There was a general moving amid the laughter; and the little band dispersed down the corridor.
In her first treading of the same corridor, unpitiedly silent in a chattering stream, Dolores met the old, youthful experience of the earnest academic novice. On the brink of the student world, where the schooling was no longer a childhood’s need, she felt the sense of her child’s achievements fade into an older humbleness before better of her kind — saw it of a sudden a world of rushing generations, and quailed under youth’s clear knowledge of the transience of things. The principal’s greeting — the welcome accorded as part of another’s duty, strengthened in its formal well-wishing the sense of being a one where the many only was significant. The next hours passed as a dream — the setting in order of the narrow student chambers, the wandering in the corridors barren of the messages of memory. It was only the awakening that lingered. Returning from the evening meal, in the common hall, which seemed a sea of voices, she came upon a student standing in the corridor alone — turning from right to left with an air which marked her a novice.