Domestic fiction; Family -- England -- Midlands -- Fiction; Midlands (England) -- Fiction
It was so difficult. There were so many things, so much to meet and
surpass. And one never knew where one was going. It was a blind fight.
She had suffered bitterly in this school of St. Philip’s. She was like
a young filly that has been broken in to the shafts, and has lost its
freedom. And now she was suffering bitterly from the agony of the
shafts. The agony, the galling, the ignominy of her breaking in. This
wore into her soul. But she would never submit. To shafts like these
she would never submit for long. But she would know them. She would
serve them that she might destroy them.
She and Maggie went to all kinds of places together, to big suffrage
meetings in Nottingham, to concerts, to theatres, to exhibitions of
pictures. Ursula saved her money and bought a bicycle, and the two
girls rode to Lincoln, to Southwell, and into Derbyshire. They had an
endless wealth of things to talk about. And it was a great joy,
finding, discovering.
But Ursula never told about Winifred Inger. That was a sort of secret
side-show to her life, never to be opened. She did not even think of
it. It was the closed door she had not the strength to open.
Once she was broken in to her teaching, Ursula began gradually to have
a new life of her own again. She was going to college in eighteen
months’ time. Then she would take her degree, and she would—ah, she
would perhaps be a big woman, and lead a movement. Who knows?—At any
rate she would go to college in eighteen months’ time. All that
mattered now was work, work.
And till college, she must go on with this teaching in St. Philip’s
School, which was always destroying her, but which she could now
manage, without spoiling all her life. She would submit to it for a
time, since the time had a definite limit.
The class-teaching itself at last became almost mechanical. It was a
strain on her, an exhausting wearying strain, always unnatural. But
there was a certain amount of pleasure in the sheer oblivion of
teaching, so much work to do, so many children to see after, so much to
be done, that one’s self was forgotten. When the work had become like
habit to her, and her individual soul was left out, had its growth
elsewhere, then she could be almost happy.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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