education. But, although she found she could do arithmetic without any
great difficulty, it never occurred to her either that her father could be
wrong or that there might be in herself the making of an exceptional
woman. The habit of love and respect kept her attention from any point
which would have led to a judgment upon her father, and she was too
unconscious of herself as a separate unit to make personal application of
anything as yet. Her mind at this time, like the hold of a ship with a
general cargo, was merely being stored with the raw materials which were
to be distributed over her whole life, and turned by degrees to many
purposes, useful, beautiful--not impossibly detestable.

But that remark of her father's about "all that women are fit for," which
he kept well watered from time to time with other conventional expressions
of a contemptuous kind, was undoubtedly the seed of much more than a
knowledge of the higher mathematics. It was that which set her mind off on
a long and patient inquiry into the condition and capacity of women, and
made her, in the end of the nineteenth century, essentially herself. But
she did not begin her inquiry of set purpose; she was not even conscious
of the particular attention she paid to the subject. She had no foregone
conclusion to arrive at, no wish to find evidence in favour of the woman
which would prove the man wrong. Only, coming across so many sneers at the
incapacity of women, she fell insensibly into the habit of asking why. The
question to begin with was always: "Why are women such inferior beings?"
But, by degrees, as her reading extended, it changed its form, and then
she asked herself doubtfully: "Are women such inferior beings?" a position
which carried her in front of her father at once by a hundred years, and
led her rapidly on to the final conclusion that women had originally no
congenital defect of inferiority, and that, although they have still much
way to make up, it now rests with themselves to be inferior or not, as
they choose.