Miss Beale’s own shyness also stood in the way of her personal intimacy with her pupils. She liked to be met more than half-way. She liked the birthday-book brought to her to sign,[68] the rare wild-flower found and gathered for her, the little note of sympathy or inquiry or thanks. A hundred reasons would keep most girls back from taking the simple steps which would have led them early to find a friend in Miss Beale. While they were reverencing in silence and at a distance there would come along some bright thing of quick perception, accustomed to society and to be welcome everywhere, untroubled by self-consciousness, who would approach the throne with no ‘unaccustomed awe,’ but stand, and chat, and smile, and be obviously acceptable to the lonely sovereign. ‘You know, A.,’ she said once to an old girl, ‘it was your freedom from shyness with me that first drew me to you.’ And, as a matter of fact, Miss Beale was really the most accessible of sovereigns. She longed to know all her children, and to help each personally. It was only a girl whose career was very short or wholly uneventful, and led in the lower classes of the school, who could remain wholly unacquainted with her. Even then, it would be found that the ten minutes’ individual talk which the Principal had with each as she left the College finally, impressed itself on the mind of the hearer. Her sympathies were ever most readily drawn out by those likely in after years to exercise influence—in some prominent, possibly Imperial position, or as teachers. At all times a silent, strong, unconscious impression was produced upon most by Miss Beale’s rare absence from her post, her minute attention to her own share of the work of the College, her obvious self-devotion. ‘I can’t picture the College without her, she always seemed to be everywhere,’ one wrote after her death. Another said, ‘Although she might never speak to you, still the fact that she was not there on any day always made the College feel strange and empty.’