The increase in the number of the boarding-houses, with their slightly different characteristics, brought an obvious advantage to the College. It led the way to still cheaper houses, and to the promotion of that work so dear always to Miss Beale, helping poor students and training teachers. Never heartily sympathetic with what is generally called charitable work, afraid of seeing money given without a really equivalent return in usefulness and good work, there was one appeal to which she never turned a deaf ear. Probably she never knew any case of a girl honestly trying to improve herself, and failing in the effort for want of means, without trying to help her. Her usual plan was to advance money, which she found was almost invariably returned to her in the course of time. She would, wherever it seemed right, ask for its return on the ground that it might be of use to others, and because she was ever careful to make those she helped recognise that the possession of money is a stewardship only. But it was offered and lent and sometimes given in such a way that there should be no personal feeling of obligation and debt. ‘There is a loan fund,’ she would say when there occurred a question of the removal of a promising pupil from the College on the score of expense. And hardly any one ever heard her say more than this of the large system of help which she initiated and to a very great extent sustained alone. Some of the boarding-house mistresses generously took one girl free, or for very low terms, but the work was quietly done, known only to few. The establishment of scholarships did not fit into Miss Beale’s educational schemes. She was not wholly opposed to them. One, in 1870, was accepted for the College, when Colonel Pearce bestowed a gift of £1000 to found the Pearce Scholarship for the daughter of an army officer, and Miss Beale in the last year of her life established one for Casterton. But she had a great horror of a system by which one school or college could buy promising pupils from others, and she held that it was hard on earnest students who were not naturally quick to see assistance given only to ability. ‘I have refused,’ she said at a later period, ‘all scholarships except one, the chief condition of which is poverty. Three scholarships have been offered unasked, and an endowment for two prizes, which would have formed a good advertisement, every year, but I have refused all.’ As the College grew, Miss Beale felt more and more the need of a house where those who were trying to train themselves to be teachers could board inexpensively, and in 1876 was made that beginning which, as she said, was ‘full of blessing to the College, and of much use beyond its bounds.’ This was before the Maria Grey Training College was opened, and when there was no institution at all in which women could receive definite preparation for becoming teachers in secondary schools.