“Her energy was her most obvious quality in school. Everybody saw that, and each felt that she individually had to live up to it. Still obvious, but deeper, was her boundless faith in the possibility of achieving good ends. The choice of the school motto, ‘We work in hope,’ was characteristic. She pursued her ends without delay; she pursued them also with the confidence that in some way or other they would one day be gained. About her ends her will would be inflexible; about the means of accomplishing them her invention was elastic, and her mind open. And I suppose few persons in this world ever carried out their ends with so much or such well-deserved success. Her secret was to be uncompromising about essentials only. “Her faith in the latent possibilities of character, even when most unpromising, amounted to a principle of educational action, which she wielded with marvellous effect, because its hold was even more strong on her heart than on her head. She seemed almost to believe—but this is an exaggeration—that any one could be made to do or become anything. She produced wonderful results in the way of training up efficient workers when others would have despaired; though sometimes she did it at immense cost to herself. She believed in every one, but she would let bad work pass with no one. She was at once the strictest of critics and the least despondent. Thus she made what she would of many, especially of those who had very much to do with her in the earlier years. Not that she was ignorant of their limitations either, but limitations did not trouble her. She had absolutely none of that restless critical spirit which requires that everybody should be made to order, all over again, and different. She took them as they were, loved them, and made the best of them in both senses. “Every girl was good for something to her eye and in her heart. It was her business—our business—to find out how the most could be made of her, and to make it. And just in proportion as good in people was the reality she saw, so was their evil, for the most part, a transitory unreality. Young people at least are apt to be and do what you expect of them. She dwelt on the good, insisted on it to them, wrestled for it with them, established it in them, and straightway forgot the evil or remembered it only as a passing phase. And the sign of this large-hearted sympathy in an optimistic temperament is shown in the special devotion to Miss Buss of all the so-called naughty girls.