Cambridge (England) -- Pictorial works; University of Cambridge -- Pictorial works
She had besides a strong belief in the value of academic advantages. It
was in order that some crumbs of things academic might fall to the
teachers in elementary schools, that she arranged the summer meetings
of University Extension Lecture students. Miss dough’s belief in
happiness--in people’s right to happiness--was the source of most
delightful qualities. She had waited, she said, for her own till she was
fifty years old, and it had come to her with Newnham. She insisted on
the little pleasures “which bring joy by the way.” Nothing was too small
to engage her own attention, and her educational qualities lay in
awaking similar interest in others, as her moral disposition led her to
share and so to increase the common stock of interests and supports in
life. And so on the rare occasions when she left the college boundaries
she would recount to the students at her table or in her room all that
had interested her during her absence. She busied herself over the
minutest details of their health or well-being, and finding that two
students made a simple supper upstairs on Sunday, she arrived at the
door carrying a good-sized table, because she had noticed there was none
convenient for the purpose. Newnham was for her a big house, and the
students were grown-up daughters in a delightful family not yet realised
elsewhere, each of whom had her own place in the world, her own personal
life, its rights and liberties. Yet the “head” who habitually intervened
in small college matters (with a total lack of power of organisation,
which in the administration of Newnham she left to others) and who was
frequently agitated and over anxious about them, balanced these things
by a life-long habit of interest in large public affairs, and, what was
more strange, by a very real serenity. She did not think the individual
should be sacrificed to the college, or “to a cause, however good.” She
never lived in a small milieu--even Newnham.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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