Miss Montrose’s school, for which I was bound, proved to he a pleasant old Georgian building, standing in a park of its own at the foot of the Downs. It was difficult to imagine, even then, that this huge barrack of a place, which had contained some forty rooms even before its enlargement, had ever been utilized for the needs, and staffed by the servants, of a single family! It was now some three times its original size: and yet a school of a hundred girls found it cramped and uncomfortable enough. I was horrified to find, on my arrival, that I should have to share a maid with five other girls, and that my bedroom would be the only sanctum in which I could find privacy. Miss Montrose herself, a prehistoric old lady who still affected the knitted jumper and the bobbed hair of fifteen years earlier, greeted me with a slightly _de haut en bas_ manner—the legacy, I suppose, of the old days of school-mistressing. She was a fine character, and a few years earlier, though then nearly sixty years of age, had gone up to Oxford and taken her degree in book-keeping and dairy-work. It is no small testimony to her strength of character that she was able to manage a school of a hundred girls with only fifteen assistant mistresses to help her. Most of these I found to be pleasant, civil-spoken sort of women, many of whom had embraced school-mistressing as a vocation, although they might have gone far in one of the learned professions. I always distrust people who say they look back to their school days as the happiest time of their lives: either they must have been unimaginative women from the first, or retrospect has mellowed for them the sour realities of memory. For myself, during the earlier part of my time at any rate, I was profoundly unhappy. Looking back, I think it was chiefly the irritating restraints which were put upon our liberty that annoyed me. No girl, for instance, might go up to London more than twice a term (unless, of course, she was visiting her parents). No girl might enter the public house in the village. No girl might keep a motor-bicycle—and so on. The science of education was then in its infancy, and school authorities did not realize that, in thus fettering the liberties of their young patronesses, they were unfitting them for positions of responsibility later on, and causing the gravest inhibitions in their subconsciousnesses. These regulations were enforced by a system of punishments which would, nowadays, be condemned as brutalizing. In proportion to the magnitude of the offence, the offender used to receive a quarter of an hour’s, or half an hour’s, or an hour’s “talking to” by Miss Montrose herself. She would make you sit down in a comfortable chair while she sat opposite you on a stiff one, and so would lecture you, by the clock, unmercifully. She would point out that the mistresses, who gave their services in the cause of education for nothing or next to nothing, ought to be treated with admiration and