“So I first saw Miss Buss in her own home, in the drawing-room of Myra Lodge, gracious, dignified, strong of head, tender of heart, as I ever knew her afterwards. She gave me an hour or more of her precious time, and explained to me clearly and graphically, as she was wont, the then present position of affairs as regarded the education of girls and the prospects of teaching as a professional career. Great was her zeal at all times, and her ambition in the cause of the women who work for their living, and so she laid stress on the new opportunities for making a position and an ample income that the educational demand was opening up to women, a profession with a few great prizes and many smaller ones having taken the place of the resident governess’ limited outlook. So she told me about the new Endowed Schools for Girls, and, among other things, that the great prize (financially speaking) would be the projected St. Paul’s School for Girls, the mistress of which would have a salary rising to as much as £2000 a year. Alas! that was a project which is only a project still, and the North London Collegiate School remains, as it was twenty years ago, at the high-water mark of remuneration for women’s labour. It was her view that, for the dignity and efficiency of teaching in this branch and for the good of women-workers generally, there should be many more prizes at least as great, and at all times she was much concerned that reasonably good salaries should be secured, especially for that class of assistant teachers who remain at work for the best part of their lives. “But the central interest of that first conversation turned, to my mind, upon the expression of her views about the importance of teachers being trained for their work. It seemed to her so obvious that she who undertakes to carry out an undertaking so delicate and difficult as that of education should first make as careful a study as might be of the end to be attained and the means of attaining it, and should be trained as an artist is trained in the _technique_ and spirit of his work. She was, above all things, practical, and her feeling in the matter was of practical origin, while my feeling, which coincided with it, sprang rather from a theoretical root. She was an artist’s daughter, and her method of judgment was largely the artistic method. She saw her problems whole, as concrete ends to be gained, and she found her way to them intuitively as she went on. She always saw truth in the concrete, and was so little _doctrinaire_ herself that the _doctrinaire_ character in other people did not rouse her antipathy and interfere with her perception of merit in their theories. It is the pure theorists who are most impatient of each other.