Complaints of overwork came often from homes where there was little cultivation or regard for the things of the mind. Girls who could produce, in what they called their ‘notes of lectures,’ statements concerning ‘_heroic cutlets_’[44] and ‘_Lincoln’s hotel_’[45] had not, it may be well understood, much intellectual background. Yet the wholly unfounded complaints of the parents of such pupils would receive public attention that was little deserved. There were others, whose parents would have had them play a pretty part in home life in the afternoon and evening, but who naturally did not find enough time for lessons unless they sat up late or slurred them over. As it was never Miss Beale’s intention that day-pupils should consider themselves to be anything but ‘in the schoolroom,’ the home work was not arranged to allow time for more than the necessary walk or recreation. The question of overwork is one that still agitates the scholastic world. The real difficulty, at Cheltenham as elsewhere, is not with the schoolgirl whose life is under supervision, but with the young teachers and the elder pupils who have the management of their own time and health, and have not yet learned their own limitations, or acquired a due measure of self-control. During the early period of the history of the College, Miss Beale came in contact with minds and ideas outside her own school, chiefly by means of the Schools’ Inquiry Commission, and the matter of public examinations. Those who wished had the opportunity of learning her views through her magazine articles and the pamphlets which she began at this time to publish. The most notable of these was ‘The Address to Parents.’ Much of this valuable little paper—one which in her early years as head-mistress made Miss Beale’s ideas widely known among those who cared for real education—had been anticipated in her address to the Social Science Congress in 1865. Then she pleaded the cause of day-schools, urging for them that they offered a training which did not separate children from the influence of home. ‘Of course when children are educated at home, and an anxious mother daily sees and suffers from her children’s faults of temper and disposition, she will be tempted to think that she had better give up the training into other hands, and send them away. Doubtless this is sometimes wise, often unavoidable; but how frequently without necessity is the burden of parental responsibility temporarily cast aside, only to press with tenfold weight in later years. How many parents have learned bitterly to regret that they removed a daughter from the divinely appointed influences of home, and severed by long separation those bonds of affection which might have checked the young in the hour of temptation, and been the support and comfort of their own declining years.’