“It is needless to enlarge on her possession of the administrator’s gift of relying with generous trust upon her tried helpers. This, too, was in her a matter of the heart quite as much as of the head. She felt about them as one with her in a joint work of which in all its phases she spoke as ‘ours,’ not as ‘mine.’ It was pleasanter, more natural to her, to be the controlling centre of a plural will than to be a single will governing others with more or less allowance for their freedom. As regards the question of the relation of the head to her assistants, this might be described as the theory of her practice, elastic as all theories must be in a mind of truly practical genius. She believed thoroughly in the legal autocracy of the head as the best form of school government, but in her view of the autocrat’s standard for himself she expected him to exercise rule with due regard for ministers and parliaments.” ------------------------------------------------------------------------ CHAPTER X. THE HEAD-MISTRESSES’ ASSOCIATION. “L’Union fait la Force.” Probably none of her public work gave Miss Buss more unqualified satisfaction than the Head-mistresses’ Association, of which the first germ seems to be contained in a passage from one of her Journal-letters of September, 1874, written from Bonaly Tower, Edinburgh— “Miss Beale of Cheltenham called on me the day I was in London.... She and I think we must form an Association of Head-mistresses, and hold conferences occasionally, in order to know what we ought to assert and what surrender. “Dr. Hodgson showed me, in the ‘Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table,’ a passage about the ‘_membre à question_,’ and the ‘_membre à by-laws_;’ the latter is called ‘_un Empereur manqué_,’ and is the member who awes the rest of a committee by his rigid adherence to by-laws. “Just think of _men_ discussing for hours the arrangements of girls’ boarding-houses—how the beds should stand, etc.!” All who have been behind the scenes in the development of public schools for girls can read in between the lines here the various stages by which the Association of Head-mistresses came into being.