Little Alice before long will probably make clear what she wants to learn: if so, she may as well learn it. Nobody has yet formulated the end of education with final completeness: it is largely a matter of acquiring good habits and an internal harmony which ensure smooth and profitable running when the engine is competent to run by itself. It certainly does not matter much what is learnt, provided that it is learned thoroughly and with eagerness. Some people insist that mastery of tools is the ideal of education: but what are little Alice’s tools? They are partly physical, partly emotional and partly intellectual: her great charm, in contrast to her sisters in Latin countries and in America, is that she is not encouraged to learn the use of her physical attractions and feminine emotions too early. Mastery of tools and mastery of self are formulas better applicable to the maturer education of the young man. The tools of a woman are hardly suitable in the hands of a little girl, whose older self is still to be. If I were to invent a formula for little Alice it would be something like “happiness, eagerness and enthusiasm.” If she has these while she is young, misery, apathy and boredom are not likely to be hers when she is older. Barbara has finished her song, and has settled down to give the Teddy Bear a teaparty. There she sits, the acutest judge and observer of her father in all the world. She is gathering memories which will never leave her, as I gathered them from my father—the smell of his shaving soap in the morning, the scratch of his rougher cheek in the good-night kiss, the feel of his clothes, the tones of his voice in pleasure and in anger, his difficult standard of good manners, his awful moments of irritation when he was almost too dreadful to look on and his voice was like the rumbling of an earthquake, his little mysterious jokes with my mother at which I laughed without in the least knowing why, the way in which he could be humoured, the hush that was expected when he was said to be tired or busy, his real but diffident sympathy in tragedies, the jolly way he took sovereigns out of his waistcoat pocket, his one glorious outburst when bicycling against the driver of an obstructive dray, the radiance shed by his approval and the gloom of his, as I now suspect, often legendary displeasure, his never failing urbanity, of a consistency almost comic, amid the extemporary and the haphazard. A sensitive plate is now taking in my own foibles and mannerisms. When in after years that plate is fully developed and the results are contemplated with amused commiseration, I shall be content if there is no injured comment on the chance given to the owner and developer of that plate of becoming what she ought to be, an Englishwoman of the best kind. CHAPTER III BIG GIRLS