A year at this school was supposed to finish her education, and it is not surprising that when she got home again at the age of eleven she could not write a tidy letter. She was reproached with not having profited better by the money spent on keeping her at an expensive school; her mother said that she would have been content had she only learnt to write well and to keep accounts, as that was all a woman was expected to know. Mary was delighted to be free again, and felt like a wild animal escaped out of a cage. She spent hours on the seashore studying the shells and the stones, and watching the crabs and jelly-fish. When bad weather kept her indoors, she read every book she could find, and especially delighted in Shakespeare, but an aunt who visited them found fault with her mother for letting her spend so much time in reading, and she was sent to the village school to learn plain sewing. She soon made a fine linen shirt for her brother so well that she was taken away from school and given the charge of all the house linen, which she had to make and to mend. But she was vexed that people should find fault with her reading, and thought it unjust that women should have been given a desire for knowledge, if it were wrong for them to acquire it. Every opportunity for study was used by her, and when a cousin lent her a French book, she set to work, with the help of a dictionary and the little grammar she had learnt at school, to make out the sense of it. There were two small globes in the house, and her mother allowed the village schoolmaster to come during a few weeks in the winter evenings to teach her how to use them. She loved to watch the stars from her bedroom window, and to find out their names on the celestial globe. When Mary was thirteen, her mother spent a winter in Edinburgh, and then at last Mary went to a school where she learnt a little arithmetic and to write properly. An uncle gave her a piano, and she had lessons in playing it. When they got back to Burntisland she used to spend four or five hours daily at her piano. She also began to teach herself Latin, but did not dare to tell this to any one till she went to stay with an uncle who was very kind to her. She told him what she was doing, and he encouraged her by telling her about learned women in the past, and what was more, read Virgil with her in his study every morning for an hour or two. Whilst staying with another uncle in Edinburgh, she attended a dancing school, and learnt to dance minuets and reels. Party politics were violent in those days, and Mary’s father and uncle were strong Tories. She heard such bitter abuse of the Liberals that her sense of justice was revolted, and she adopted Liberal opinions, which she stuck to all her life.