‘Does Nature intend one half of the human race to be ciphers?’ ‘Nature intends men to have wives. There is no escaping that fact. When I was a girl we got quite as much education as society required of us.’ ‘Society!’ ‘We learned modern languages, French and Italian, for of course German was not in vogue, and I must say I think Italian much the more feminine accomplishment.’ ‘That is paying an exceedingly high compliment to German, ma’am!’ ‘And we studied English literature, solidly, not out of little green-backed handbooks. Never a day passed that I did not read Addison, or some other fine Queen Anne writer, aloud to my father. And we knew how to write a letter. And we coloured from Nature, for the love of the thing, exceedingly well, some of us, though there was no South Kensington, and we never called ourselves art students, and, and--Marjorie Bartrand, how did this conversation begin?’ ‘Apropos of Spain, did it not?’ ‘To be sure. Apropos of your Girton scheme, your wish to see classics and mathematics pushed into a country where women are still content to be women, and very womanly ones. University teaching for girls is a freak that will die out of itself, like coal-scuttle bonnets, bishops’ sleeves, crinoline, or any other mode that is at once cumbersome and unbeautiful.’ Afternoon sunshine was flooding the weather-beaten lichened walls of Tintajeux Manoir. The Atlantic glittered, one vast field of diamonds, until it melted into pallid sky along the southern horizon line. The keen, cool ocean saltness mingled with and almost overbalanced the fragrance of the pinks, heliotropes, and roses in the Reverend Andros Bartrand’s old-fashioned borders. On a garden bench, at some short distance from the house, were seated two ladies, fresh of face, both; countrified of dress; fast friends, although more than forty years stood between their ages. A cedar of Lebanon spread wide its layers of odorous darkness above their heads. A grass plot, emerald green, close shorn, was their carpet. ‘If your wits were your fortune, child, such ambitions might be pardonable.’ So, after a space, the enemy of progress resumed her parable. ‘In families where the olive branches are in excess of the exchequer, the governess, Heaven help her, is expected to “ground” the boys, as they call it, in Latin grammar and Euclid. But with your grandfather’s position, your own inheritance, putting the idea of your marriage aside----’