And one is glad to think how often that sense of humour must have come to relieve the intensity of that first conscious struggle for freedom, when she herself felt that in venturing forward she was renouncing a good deal,—that the life before her was an uncharted sea. “Worst thing about Queen’s College is—no Sarah till Christmas,” she writes. “M. brought me an invite to write for the Sunday School Quarterly. Sat up till 2 a.m. Friday to write story on 18th after Trinity. I wonder if I shall succeed, and, if so, how compatible with Queen’s? Sept. 25th. All settled for Queen’s. Mrs. Williams writes very kindly.... Having rather hard work with Redknap, five lessons a week. Must try for 2nd class in Mathematics, and, if I can, for more. Absurd panic at Dunham lest I should be a ‘governess’! Awful phantom!” It is difficult for girl students of the present day to imagine all that was meant by the opening of Queen’s College in 1858. The plan of establishing a college for women had been much discussed by Alfred Tennyson, Charles Kingsley, and others; and the work had been warmly taken up by Frederick Denison Maurice, E. H. Plumptre (afterwards Dean of Wells) and R. C. Trench (afterwards Archbishop of Dublin), all three of whom were represented on the teaching staff.[14] We may imagine what it meant for S. J.-B. to pass from the hands of the average schoolmistress of that day to teachers such as these. Footnote 14: See Mrs. Alec Tweedie’s interesting record of “The First College for Women.” On the 5th October she settled down to work, and three days later she writes: “Very delicious it is to be here. ‘Oh, if there be an Elysium on earth, it is this, it is this!’ I am inclined to say. I am as happy as a queen. Work and independence! What can be more charming? Really perfection. So delicious in the present, what will it be to look back upon?” She was “fay” that night, as they say in Scotland: it was scarcely lucky to be so happy. She little guessed, poor child, “what it would be to look back upon” her life at Queen’s. Much happiness she got from that life, no doubt,—a rich harvest of education, contact with interesting temperaments and able minds, friendships that were only broken by death. But there are some people endowed for better or worse, with the gift of taking what seem to be the side-issues of life far too intensely, of living half-a-dozen lives in addition to the one they have definitely chosen, of wringing out of an average human lot an amount of joy, of experience and of suffering that to their companions would seem simply incredible. And S. J.-B. was essentially one of these. Incidentally in the course of the day’s work she would develop fresh interests, make unusual friendships, perhaps even incur resentments that might well have demanded her whole strength and energy; and all these threads had to be carried on in addition to the recognized work of her life.