standard of brilliance and efficiency. She joined the Teachers' Debating
Society. Not that she debated. She had once put some elementary questions
in an inaudible voice, and had been requested to speak a little louder,
whereupon she sank into her seat and spoke no more. But she heard a great
deal. About the emancipation of women; about the women's labour market;
about the doors that were now thrown open to women. She was told that all
they wanted was a fair field and no favour. (The speaker, a rosy-cheeked
child of one-and-twenty, was quite violent in her repudiation of favour.)
And Miss Quincey believed it all, though she understood very little about
it.

But it was illumination, a new gospel to her, this doctrine of General
Culture; it was the large easy-fitting formula which she had seemed to
need. With touching simplicity she determined to follow the course
recommended by the Head. Though by the time she had corrected some
seventy manuscripts in marble-backed covers, and prepared her lesson for
the next day, she had nothing but the fag-end of her brain to give to the
healers and regenerators; as for rising, Miss Quincey felt much more like
going to bed, and it was as much as she could do to drag her poor little
body there. Still Miss Quincey was nothing if not heroic; night after
night twelve o'clock would find her painfully trying to draw water from
the wells of literature. She had begun upon Browning; set herself to read
through the whole of _Sordello_ from beginning to end. It is as easy as a
sum in arithmetic if you don't bother your head too much about the
Guelphs and Ghibellines and the metaphors and things, and if you take it
in short fits, say three pages every evening. Never any more, or you
might go to sleep and forget all about it; never any less, or you would
have bad arrears. As there are exactly two hundred and thirteen pages,
she calculated that she would finish it in ten weeks and a day. There was
no place for Miss Quincey and her pile of marble-backed exercise-books in