"I didn't care for the life; I thought it
cramping. You see, if we women are ever to be free in the world,
we must have in the end a freeman's education. But the education
at Girton made only a pretence at freedom. At heart, our girls
were as enslaved to conventions as any girls elsewhere. The whole
object of the training was to see just how far you could manage to
push a woman's education without the faintest danger of her
emancipation."
"You are right," Alan answered briskly, for the point was a pet one
with him. "I was an Oxford man myself, and I know that servitude.
When I go up to Oxford now and see the girls who are being ground
in the mill at Somerville, I'm heartily sorry for them. It's worse
for them than for us; they miss the only part of university life
that has educational value. When we men were undergraduates, we
lived our whole lives, lived them all round, developing equally
every fibre of our natures. We read Plato, and Aristotle, and John
Stuart Mill, to be sure,--and I'm not quite certain we got much
good from them; but then our talk and thought were not all of
books, and of what we spelt out in them.
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