Financial difficulties were not, however, the only ones that Miss Beale had to fight, nor were they the hardest. Far greater foes to her peace of mind were those of ignorance, prejudice, and lack of ideals about girls’ education. Practical difficulties, too, stood in the way of high attainment. Dorothea Beale relates some of these in her “History of the Ladies’ College”. It was said that college life would “turn girls into boys”. Day schools for girls were unpopular, and the custom of having morning and afternoon school caused parents a great deal of trouble in sending maids with their children. Teachers were scarce and those to be had were very inferior. “Do you prepare your lessons?” asked Dorothea Beale of a candidate. “Oh no!” she replied, “I never teach anything I don’t understand.” Parents looked with horror on the teaching of mathematics and even advanced arithmetic, in spite of the poverty to which ignorance of investments often reduced women. Some reminiscences of former pupils give a little idea of what Dorothea Beale was like in her teaching and in her relationship to her children. “I never remember her raising her voice, scolding us, being satirical or impatient with dullness or inattention. She was not satirical even when a small girl, on being asked what criticism might be passed on Milton’s treatment of “Paradise Lost,” ventured the audacious suggestion that the poet was ‘verbose’.” Her methods were designed to encourage rather than to repress. A pupil recalls “an afternoon when she visited the needlework room and found me being most justly blamed for inefficiency. In kindly tones she said to the shy and clumsy culprit: ‘You ought to sew well, for your mother has such beautiful long fingers,’ and somehow I felt comforted and encouraged. Then there was a day when I summoned up courage to go and tell her that I had been guilty of some small disobedience as well as others who had been detected and punished. She seized the opportunity of impressing upon me that as I was (though only fourteen) a teacher in my father’s Sunday School--a fact of which I did not know she was aware--I must surely see that obedience to rule was necessary. I can still hear the low, earnest tones in which she made her appeal to my sense of justice and right.” At this period of her life her power was probably as great as it ever was, though the scope was comparatively narrow. “It is my peculiar privilege,” writes one, “to have spent all my college career in her class, to go through years of her special personal teaching. In later days when the College assumed large dimensions, such an experience must have been rare; to those who could claim it, it meant a potent influence for life. How vividly can I recall her sitting on her little daïs, scanning the long schoolroom and discovering anything amiss at the far end of it; or making a tour of inspection to the various classes with a smiling countenance that banished terror.”