“Presently a time came when I resolved, not to do a little teaching, but to throw my whole life into the work of education. Especially I wanted to teach girls mathematics. I thought that women’s lives would be happier and sounder if they had, as a matter of course, their fair share of the sterner intellectual discipline that had been such a joy to me. My father was a born teacher and an educational enthusiast. Moreover, to his scientific habit of mind it was as natural to regard teaching as a scientific art as to believe that girls should be fully educated. My feeling about these things was, in the first instance, the continuation of his. Then I was early a disciple, in matters philosophical, of the great Mill; and my first definite idea of a science of education, comparable in practical efficiency to the science of medicine, was built up out of a suggestion in the pages of his great work on Logic. I had just begun to be a student of psychology, and was so profoundly interested in problems of life and character that I was strongly drawn to turn my taste for scribbling, then very strong, to writing novels of a serious workmanlike kind. However, I was resolved that they must be first-rate novels, and I had doubts—wise doubts—that I could count on myself for such. But in education the work was sure to be good world-building work, however humble, if honestly done, and my interest in psychology could take practical shape in it. So I resolved to leave the pen for leisure moments, to take to blackboard and chalk instead, and thus to work out real results in thought and character—that is, if I could get the chance. And presently the best of all chances was given. An old pupil of the Camden Street School had been a student with me at Bedford College, and from her I obtained an introduction—a great boon, I thought it—to the founder and head of the North London Collegiate School.