What was she before she knew Gertrude? She thought of that earlier
Delia as of a creature almost too contemptible to blame. From the
maturity of her twenty-one years she looked back upon herself at
seventeen or eighteen with wonder. That Delia had read nothing--knew
nothing--had neither thoughts or principles. She was her father's
spoilt child and darling; delighting in the luxury that surrounded his
West Indian Governorship; courted and flattered by the few English of
the colonial capital, and by the members of her father's staff; with
servants for every possible need or whim; living her life mostly in the
open air, riding at her father's side, through the sub-tropical forests
of the colony; teasing and tyrannising over the dear old German
governess who had brought her up, and whose only contribution to her
education--as Delia now counted education--had been the German tongue.
Worth something!--but not all those years, "when I might have been
learning so much else, things I shall never have time to learn
now!--things that Gertrude has at her finger's end. Why wasn't I taught
properly--decently--like any board school child! As Gertrude says, we
women want everything we can get! We _must_ know the things that men
know--that we may beat them at their own game. Why should every Balliol
boy--years younger than me--have been taught his classics and
mathematics,--and have everything brought to him--made easy for
him--history, political economy, logic, philosophy, laid at his
lordship's feet, if he will just please to learn!--while I, who have
just as good a brain as he, have had to pick up a few scraps by the
way, just because nobody who had charge of me ever thought it worth
while to teach, a girl. But I have a mind!--an intelligence!--even if I
am a woman; and there is all the world to know. Marriage? Yes!--but not
at the sacrifice of everything else--of the rational, civilised self."

On the whole though, her youth had been happy enough, with recurrent