“I have been asked to write some account of these latter—perhaps we might call them triumphant—years of my dear friend’s life-work, as I saw them in the light of my close connection with her, and the marvellous friendship she extended to me. These were the years when she had entered, in one sense, into the fruits of her labours. The school she founded had become a public school—‘Miss Buss’ school’ still—but immortalized. The women’s educational movement, in the moulding of which she had been a potent force, had taken shape, and was moving to its goal—that goal of equal opportunity with the hitherto more favoured sex, which we younger women are apt to regard as our natural birthright, although we have not entirely secured it yet. There were many worries for her still, and very much work on educational problems; but as regards the general question of the education of girls, the critical turnings on the road were practically passed when I joined it, and to reverse the course of our educational efforts would have been like turning back the Thames at—well, not London Bridge—say, Maidenhead. “In 1875, the future of women was, I believe, much more certain than it appeared. It may be that I think this because it was always taken so much as a matter of course in the logic of my family circle. It had never been suggested to me in my life that I had not an equal birthright to knowledge with my brother. Hence it happened most naturally that I was an early candidate for the Senior Local Examinations, out of which came my acquaintance with Miss Emily Davies, and afterwards with Miss Buss. I remember seeing her among her girls in the intervals of the examination; and she, as I afterwards learned, was interested in the girl whose chief subject was mathematics. Our family birthright was specially in mathematics, and all of us, boys and girls, grew up to cultivate that soil. I dwell on this fact here because it was as a woman who could teach mathematics that Miss Buss first sent for me. She believed that young girls should be taught by women, and she wanted to build up mathematical studies.