Her personal relationship to any of her children in sorrow was always a very tender one. “When I was almost a child at College I lost my mother and shall never forget Miss Beale’s tender sympathy and help. She took such interest in my preparation for Confirmation and brought me herself to my first Communion--just she and I alone: a day I shall always remember. All through my girlhood she was a kind and ready adviser, and continued her interest throughout my married life. One always felt whatever happened to one, ‘Now I must tell Miss Beale’.” So with the varied joys of teaching, and the difficulties of narrow means, and the opposition of supporters of the old régime, did Dorothea Beale’s life at Cheltenham begin. Forty years later she wrote of this time:-- “How often I was full of discouragement. It was not so much the want of money as the want of ideals that depressed me. If I went into society I heard it said: ‘What is the good of education for our girls? They have not to earn their living.’ Those who spoke did not see that, for women as for men, it is a sin to bury the talents God has given: they seemed not to know that the baptismal right was the same for girls as for boys, alike enrolled in the army of light, soldiers of Jesus Christ.” No knight of olden times who rode forth against the evils of his day needed greater courage than this woman who set out to destroy the evils of prejudice, custom, and ignorance. I have spoken sometimes with her “old girls,” who were with her in the early days, and were among the first to enter on paths untrodden by women’s feet. They were like men who seek a new land; no sacrifice seemed too great; no toil seemed too hard. Following their dauntless leader they knew themselves to be the vanguard of a great army of women infinite in number and of unknown power. CHAPTER VI. ON EDUCATION. “Knowledge is now no more a fountain sealed.”--TENNYSON, “The Princess”. In order to understand Dorothea Beale’s work and that of her many contemporaries who were working towards the same end, it is necessary to know something of the depths to which girls’ education had sunk in that day. All readers of Ruskin’s “Sesame and Lilies” are familiar with his bitter invective against the attitude of parents towards this important question, and his passionate appeal for reform. And Ruskin was only one of the many men who realised the pity of the paltry and superficial education that girls received, and the extent to which the whole world suffered on this account. So strong had public feeling become among the better educated on this burning question that, in the year 1864, a Schools’ Inquiry Commission was instituted; and as far as possible a thorough investigation was made of the subject. Reports on Girls’ Schools were given by Mr. Fitch, Mr. Bryce, and others.