What was she before she knew Gertrude? She thought of that earlier Delia as of a creature almost too contemptible to blame. From the maturity of her twenty-one years she looked back upon herself at seventeen or eighteen with wonder. That Delia had read nothing--knew nothing--had neither thoughts or principles. She was her father's spoilt child and darling; delighting in the luxury that surrounded his West Indian Governorship; courted and flattered by the few English of the colonial capital, and by the members of her father's staff; with servants for every possible need or whim; living her life mostly in the open air, riding at her father's side, through the sub-tropical forests of the colony; teasing and tyrannising over the dear old German governess who had brought her up, and whose only contribution to her education--as Delia now counted education--had been the German tongue. Worth something!--but not all those years, "when I might have been learning so much else, things I shall never have time to learn now!--things that Gertrude has at her finger's end. Why wasn't I taught properly--decently--like any board school child! As Gertrude says, we women want everything we can get! We _must_ know the things that men know--that we may beat them at their own game. Why should every Balliol boy--years younger than me--have been taught his classics and mathematics,--and have everything brought to him--made easy for him--history, political economy, logic, philosophy, laid at his lordship's feet, if he will just please to learn!--while I, who have just as good a brain as he, have had to pick up a few scraps by the way, just because nobody who had charge of me ever thought it worth while to teach, a girl. But I have a mind!--an intelligence!--even if I am a woman; and there is all the world to know. Marriage? Yes!--but not at the sacrifice of everything else--of the rational, civilised self." On the whole though, her youth had been happy enough, with recurrent intervals of _ennui_ and discontent. Intervals too of poetic enthusiasm, or ascetic religion. At eighteen she had been practically a Catholic, influenced by the charming wife of one of her father's aides-de-camp. And then--a few stray books or magazine articles had made a Darwinian and an agnostic of her; the one phase as futile as the other. "I knew nothing--I had no mind!"--she repeated with energy,--"till Gertrude came." And she thought with ardour of that intellectual awakening, under the strange influence of the apparently reserved and impassive woman, who had come to read history with her for six months, at the suggestion of a friend of her father's, a certain cultivated and clever Lady Tonbridge, "who saw how starved I was."