Lesbians -- Fiction; Psychological fiction; Women teachers -- Fiction
It is certain that the school was never again quite as it had been
before her advent. The Cynthia Griffiths term remained a school date
from which to reckon as the nation reckons from the Jubilee. In an
American school Cynthia Griffiths must have been at least a disturbing
element--in the staid English establishment, with its curious mixture of
modern pedagogy and Early Victorian training, she was seismic.
With their usual adaptability, the new girls, as they accustomed
themselves subduedly to the strange atmosphere, had found nothing to
cavil at in the school arrangements. They had not thought it incongruous
to come from Swedish exercises to prolonged and personal daily prayers,
kneeling for ten minutes at a time while their head mistress wrestled
with Deity. It might have bored girls of sixteen and eighteen to learn
their daily Bible verse, and recite it alternately with the Kindergarten
and Lower School, but it never occurred to them to protest, any more
than they were likely to object to the little note-book which each girl
carried, with its printed list of twenty-five possible crimes, and the
dangling pencil wherewith, at tea-time, to mark herself innocent or
guilty. The hundred and one rules that Edith Marsham had found useful in
the youth of her seminary, forty years before, and that time had
rendered obsolete, irritating, or merely unintelligible, were
nevertheless endured with entire good nature by her successions of
pupils. Alwynne and her contemporaries might fume in private and Clare
shrug her shoulders in languid tolerance, but nobody thought it worth
while to question directly the entire sufficiency of a bygone system to
the needs of the new century's hockey-playing generations.
But a little leaven leaveneth the whole lump.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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