Pascal’s life perhaps breathed for her a spirit of emulation. ‘I borrowed a Euclid, and without any help read the first six books, carefully working through the whole of the fifth, as I did not know what was usually done. It did not occur to me to ask my father for lessons in such subjects.’[16] She also made some way with algebra, and calculated for herself the distance to the moon. Much time, she owned, was wasted by working alone. But the very difficulties proved a source of help, showing her the value of knowledge acquired by effort and search, as opposed to mere information received from another. In all her reading she received both help and sympathy from her aunt, Elizabeth Complin, who herself understood Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, had considerable taste for mathematics, and was fond of philosophy. She was one of the first subscribers to Mudie’s. The London Library was also a mine of wealth to the young readers. Outside her home, the chief educational influence for Dorothea at this period must have been the lectures of the Literary Institution at Crosby Hall, and more especially the Gresham Lectures. She attended some of these in company with a younger sister, who often grew weary and hungry when Dorothea, after a long morning’s work, would stay to talk abstrusely with a professor, or linger over a bookstall on the way home to dinner. The professor was probably Mr. Pullen, of whose lectures on astronomy she wrote that they ‘inspired a passionate desire to know more of mathematics, and to understand all the processes described. I obtained books on mechanics and spelt them out as well as I was able, but was often baffled. The mysteries of the Calculus I pored over in vain ... not knowing that I lacked the knowledge which alone could make it intelligible.’[17] Dorothea’s educational fortune proved itself to be better than that of the Prioress, for in 1847 she was sent with two elder sisters, their characters ‘ripe for observation,’ to Mrs. Bray’s fashionable school for English girls in the Champs Elysées. This school, kept by English ladies, was supposed to offer a good English education, as well as French.