Utopias -- Fiction; Women -- Legal status, laws, etc. -- Fiction
Professor Ingleby lived on the Trumpington Road, about a mile and a
quarter from the Senate House. Her residence was a large and handsome
house shut in by a high wall, with extensive grounds, and surrounded by
high trees, so that no one could see the garden from the main road. The
house was a certain mystery to the girls who on Sundays took their
constitutional to Trumpington and back. Some said that the Professor was
ashamed of her husband, which was the reason why he was never seen, not
even at Church; others said that she kept him in such rigid discipline
that she refused the poor man permission even to walk outside the
grounds of the house. Her two daughters, who regularly came to church
with their mother, were pretty girls, but had a submissive gentle look
quite strange among the turbulent young spirits of the University. They
were never seen in society; and for some reason unknown to anybody
except herself, the Professor refused to enter them at any college.
Meantime no one was invited to the house: when one or two ladies tried
to break through the reserve so strangely maintained by the most
learned Professor in the University, and left their cards, the visit
was formally returned by the Professor herself, accompanied by one of
her girls. But things went no further, and invitations were neither
accepted nor returned. It is therefore not surprising that this learned
woman, who seemed guided by none of the motives which influence most
women--who was not ambitious, who refused rank, who desired not
money--gradually came to bear a mythical character. She was represented
as an ogre: the undergraduates, always fond of making up stories, amused
themselves by inventing legends about her home life and her autocratic
rule. Some, however, said that the house was haunted, her husband off
his head, and her daughters weak in their intellect. There was,
therefore, some astonishment when it was announced officially that the
Professor was bringing Lord Chester to stay at her own house--'in
perfect seclusion,' added the paper, to the disgust of all Cambridge,
who would have liked to make much of this interesting young peer.
However, long vacation had begun when he came up, so that the few left
were either the reading undergraduates or the dons.
'Here,' said the Professor, as she ushered her guest into a spacious
hall, with doors opening into other rooms on either hand, 'you will find
yourself in a house of the past. Nothing in my husband's house, or
hardly anything, that is not two hundred years old at least; nothing
which does not belong to the former dynasty: we use as little as
possible that is new.'
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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