This return from school may be considered the close of childhood; for Dorothea was now seventeen. A grave and quiet girl, so we learn from one or two friends of her youth, with a sweet, earnest expression, and deliberate speech; also with a sunshiny smile and a merry laugh on occasion. She was remarkable even in a studious, sedentary family for her love of reading and study. For her the fields of literature had taken the place of those other fields and gardens now held to be a necessity for the best development of children’s bodies and minds. But her life in the less favourable surroundings of a great city was made bright by ‘the light that never was on sea or land, the consecration and the poet’s dream.’ The joys of imagination and fancy, the delight of entering into the thoughts of the great, were hers, and lifted her above what was small and trivial. She knew also, and from babyhood seems to have known, a stern side of life. An innate sense of duty, that guide she never failed to observe, already hedged her steps, protecting her strong, eager spirit from flights of ‘unchartered freedom,’ leading it through restraint and self-denial towards a glorious liberty. There was plenty to do at home; younger sisters to be taught and schoolboys’ lessons to be superintended. The boys were at Merchant Taylors’ School, where the education was neither better nor worse than in other public schools of the day. Such as it was, it gave Dorothea a horror of the old-fashioned methods by which boys were taught Latin and Euclid, without intelligence and without sympathy. It was one of her tasks at this time to aid in the daily grind of this uninteresting work. Mrs. Frederick Sewell, an old friend of the family, remembers the boys going off to their lessons under the supervision of the clever elder sister. Uncongenial as must have been to her the work of directing boys already wearied with a long day at school, it was evidently done in a spirit of dutifulness and high endeavour. In 1876, a brother, the Reverend Edward Beale of the Society of St. John the Evangelist, Cowley, wrote to her after what proved to be a final parting: ‘Our lives seem wonderfully linked together, and I am more conscious every year how much my life has been influenced by your early teaching. If I had followed that way of _Duty_ I should have found the entrance less rugged to the more excellent way.’ Nor was the task a wasted one for Dorothea herself. She determined, she tells us, to follow her brothers’ lessons on her own account as well as theirs, and thus was enabled to gain a thorough knowledge of Latin grammar. The younger sisters remember the careful and regular teaching given them by the elder ones, the quiet instructive games they were encouraged to play with little pictures from Greek mythology, and the rewards bestowed on industrious pupils. It is on record that Dorothea herself dressed a doll for a little sister’s birthday.