The school at Wimbledon was a large, hushed, faded place presided over by a lady of hidden motives and great exterior calm named Miss Beeton Clavier. She was handsome without any improper attractiveness, an Associate in Arts of St. Andrew’s University and a cousin of Mr. Blenker of the _Old Country Gazette_. She was assisted by several resident mistresses and two very carefully married visiting masters for music and Shakespear, and playground and shrubbery and tennis-lawn were all quite effectively hidden from the high-road. The curriculum included Latin Grammar—nobody ever got to the reading of books in that formidable tongue—French by an English lady who had been in France, Hanoverian German by an irascible native, the more seemly aspects of English history and literature, arithmetic, algebra, political economy and drawing. There was no hockey played within the precincts, science was taught without the clumsy apparatus or objectionable diagrams that are now so common, and stress was laid upon the carriage of the young ladies and the iniquity of speaking in raised voices. Miss Beeton Clavier deprecated the modern “craze for examinations,” and released from such pressure her staff did not so much give courses of lessons as circle in a thorough-looking and patient manner about their subjects. This turn-spit quality was reflected in the school idiom; one did not learn algebra or Latin or so-forth, one _did_ algebra, one was _put into_ Latin.... The girls went through this system of exercises and occupations, evasively and as it were _sotto voce_, making friends, making enemies, making love to one another, following instincts that urged them to find out something about life—in spite of the most earnest discouragement.... None of them believed for a moment that the school was preparing them for life. Most of them regarded it as a long inexplicable passage of blank, grey occupations through which they had to pass. Beyond was the sunshine. Ellen gathered what came to her. She realized a certain beauty in music in spite of the biographies of great musicians, the technical enthusiasms and the general professionalism of her teacher; the literature master directed her attention to memoirs and through these she caught gleams of understanding when the characters of history did for brief intervals cease to be rigidly dignified and institutional like Miss Beeton Clavier and became human—like schoolfellows. And one little spectacled mistress, who wore art dresses and adorned her class-room with flowers, took a great fancy to her, talked to her with much vagueness and emotion of High Aims, and lent her with an impressive furtiveness the works of Emerson and Shelley and a pamphlet by Bernard Shaw. It was a little difficult to understand what these writers were driving at, they were so dreadfully clever, but it was clear they reflected criticism upon the silences of her mother and the rigidities of Miss Beeton Clavier.