There _was_ something specially bad in the English way of bringing up children. Not the ‘education’ exactly, but something else, something in the way they were treated. Something in the way they were brought up made English women so awful--with their smiles. Julia did not smile or smirk. She laughed a great deal, often to tears. And she would often suddenly beam. It was like a light coming from under her thick white skin. Was Julia the answer to the awfulness of Englishwomen? If, as Julia said, the children were all right and only the girls and grown-ups awful, it must be something in the way the children were treated. 5 Yet Julia was not impersonal. Miss Deborah, ... teaching the whole school to be ‘good’ in the Fairchild way; with her beautiful quivering nodding black head held high--blinking, and not looking at the girls separately--in a grave voice, full of Scripture history, but broken all the time, quivering with laughter and shoutings which she never uttered ... hilarious, ... she taught a system of things she had been brought up in. But all the same, she rushed along sweeping the girls with her ... and the girls believed her. If I taught her system I should have false lips and the girls would not believe me. If ever anyone had the courage to tell her of any dreadful thing, she would weep it all away; and the person would begin all over again certainly, as much as possible in the Fairchild way ... again and again until they died. Supposing a murderer came and sat down in the hall? Supposing Miss Deborah had been brought up as a Thug--killing people from behind?... Miss Jenny, exasperatedly trying to wake all the girls up to the importance of public life, sitting round in their blouses and skirts, half-amused and sometimes trying to argue, because the tone of Miss Jenny’s voice made them sorry for the other side. Politics, politics, reading history and the newspapers, the importance of history if you wanted to have any understanding of your own times. To come into the room to take the class after Miss Jenny always meant finding her stating and protesting and tapping the end of her nose, and the air hot and excited, and the girls in some sort of state of excitement which could only be got over by being very quiet and pretending not to notice them except to be very surprised if there were any disturbance. Miss Haddie, in horror of their badness, teaching them to master little set tasks because it was shocking to be an idler; loving the sinner but hating the sin much more, with a sort of horror like a girl, a horror in her eyes that was the same as the horror of insects, fearing God who was so close in the room, gloomily, all the time--wanting to teach them all to fawn on Christ. Christ would make everything all right if you made up to him. “Faint not nor fear, his arms are near. He faileth not and thou art dear.” Awful....