She had added the word "tourniquet" to her vocabulary during this time, and having looked it up in the dictionary, she requested the doctor to be so good as to teach her to make one. While doing so the doctor became interested in his silent, intelligent pupil, and it ended in his teaching her all that a young lady could learn of bandaging, of antidotes to poisons, of what to do in case of many possible accidents, and also of nursing, theoretically. But this was not a solitary instance of the quiet power of the girl which already compelled even elderly gentlemen much overworked and self-absorbed, to sacrifice themselves in her service. CHAPTER III. It is a notable thing that in almost every instance it was her father's influence which forced Evadne to draw conclusions in regard to life quite unlike any of his own, and very distasteful to him. He was the most conservative of men, and yet he was continually setting her mind off at a tangent in search of premises upon which to found ultra-liberal conclusions. His primitive theories about women and "all that they are good for," for one thing, which differed so materially from the facts as she observed them every day, formed a constant mental stimulus to which her busy brain was greatly indebted. "Women should confine their attention to housekeeping," he remarked once when the talk about the higher education of women first began to irritate elderly gentlemen. "It is all they are fit for." "Is it?" said Evadne. "Yes. And they don't know arithmetic enough to do that properly." "Don't they? why?" she asked. "Because they have no brains," he answered. "But some women have been clever," she ventured seriously. "Yes, of course; exceptional women. But you can't argue from exceptional women." "Then ordinary women have no brains, and cannot learn arithmetic?" she concluded. "Precisely," he answered irritably. Such signs of intelligence always did irritate him, somehow. Evadne found food for reflection in these remarks. She had done a certain amount of arithmetic herself in the schoolroom, and had never found it difficult, but then she had not gone far enough, perhaps. And she went at once to get a Colenso or a Barnard Smith to see. She found them more fascinating when she attacked them of her own free will and with all her intelligence than she had done when necessity, in the shape of her governess, forced her to pay them some attention, and she went through them both in a few weeks at odd times, and then asked her father's advice about a book on advanced mathematics. "Advanced mathematics!" he exclaimed. "Can you keep accounts?" "I don't know," she answered doubtfully. "Then what is this nonsense about advanced mathematics?" "Oh, I have finished Barnard Smith, and I thought I should like to go on," she explained.