My academic career at Oxford was destined to be successful beyond my expectations. When I first looked at the list of subjects which I should need in order to go through Pass Moderations, my heart sank within me. Latin! Greek! Logic! Did they think I had stepped straight out of the Middle Ages, that I should be prepared to face examination in such subjects as these? But a reference to Appendix XVIIIc of the Regulations reassured me. I had to take Latin “or some other foreign language”—the old days at Barstoke with my French governess were to come in useful after all. Instead of Greek I could take Mineralogy, Practical Farming, Middle Icelandic, Military Tactics, Geography, Mental Therapeutics, Book-keeping and Short-hand, Levantine Literature, or Old Testament Anthropology. I need hardly say that I selected Geography at once. There was a still longer list of substitutes for Logic, which seemed more formidable, but I was assured that it was almost impossible to fail in the Theory of Statistics—and so indeed I found it. My first two terms, in fact, made little demand on my intellectual capacities, and I was free to look about me, make friends, taste life, and enter into the multifarious activities of the place. I found little or no jealousy of the freshers, little or no anxiety to keep them in their place, on the part of the second-year women. On the contrary, the breakfast parties at which they used to entertain us were some of the merriest functions of my life. Heavens, what huge breakfasts we ate in those days! Tea, coffee, milk, sugar, porridge, boiled eggs or even eggs and bacon, toast, butter, marmalade, sometimes jam—and yet we felt fresh and energetic after them, ready to discuss any problem of the universe! We would sit round smoking afterwards—pipe-smoking was just coming in—indulging in our interminable conversations, till at last the claim of half-past nine lecture broke up the little company. To be late for lecture was a serious thing in those days; if the lecturer were short-tempered, it meant that you missed your guinea attendance fee. “No, it’s no use!” our geography lecturer, Hoskyns of B.N.C., would shout at us, exasperated but still courteous. “I can’t have you ladies come clattering up the Hall in those great boots, making a noise like a troop of cavalry: go back, and save up your pocket-money!” He was something of a misogynist, but unrivalled at his subject, and I do not think I ever saw a man better tailored. I early decided to read geography for my final schools, so as to continue under his tuition.