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I was not very well taught, but, like most school-girls, I had a smattering of French, and I knew the meaning of the very ordinary phrases that had been used with regard to me. Before the supper-hour, my headache became so severe that I was glad to take refuge in my own room. There I consulted my mirror, and felt disposed to forgive, the young critics for their disparaging remarks. Passee!
Ruskin's method of teaching, as illustrated in "Ethics of the Dust," has been variously pooh-poohed by his critics. It has seemed to some absurd to mix up Theology, and Crystallography, and Political Economy, and Mythology, and Moral Philosophy, with the chatter of school-girls and the romps of the playground.
Christine comes next to Tom she is nineteen, and so pretty; and then poor Hatty 'sour seventeen, as Tom called her on her last birthday; and then the two children, Ella and Katie; though Ella is nearly sixteen, and Katie fourteen, but they are only school-girls." "What a large family!" observed Miss Sefton, stifling a little yawn. "Now, mamma has only got me, for we don't count Richard."
From the manner in which you walked and talked together, one would have thought you were two school-girls telling your secrets to each other." "We were having a confidential conversation," returned Valentine; "she was owning to me her repugnance to the marriage with M. de Morcerf; and I, on the other hand, was confessing to her how wretched it made me to think of marrying M. d'Epinay."
We might perhaps find that silly school-girls at first decline to admit on terms of perfect equality one who had "worked for her living," and was, in their not very elegant parlance, "nothing but a mill-girl." Perhaps we might have to chronicle some lonely and sad hours in consequence, and some rebellious feelings hard to be kept down.
What I learned during those years was learned from personalities; from contact with a nature so simple, sincere, and strong as that of Miss Clough; from the kindly old German governess, whose affection for me helped me through some rather hard and lonely school-years spent at a school in Shropshire; and from a gentle and high-minded woman, an ardent Evangelical, with whom, a little later, at the age of fourteen or fifteen, I fell headlong in love, as was the manner of school-girls then, and is, I understand, frequently the case with school-girls now, in spite of the greatly increased variety of subjects on which they may spend their minds.
When I was a small boy at school in the early forties, during the Millerite excitement about the approaching end of all mundane things, I remember, on the day when the momentous event was expected to take place, how the larger school-girls were thrown into a great state of alarm and agitation by a thundercloud that let down a curtain of rain, blotting out the mountain on the opposite side of the valley.
I was thinking of Salome of the wonderful charm which made every one love her. Elderly women, married women, I had known and liked, but school-girls were my especial abomination. Truth to tell, I had never known any, and I did not want to know any. Even this paragon I would have gladly escaped had there been a way.
Elsie was sitting up in her bed when it came, languid, but tranquil, and Helen was by her, as usual, holding her hand, which was strangely cold, Helen thought, for one who was said to have some kind of fever. The school-girls' basket was brought in with its messages of love and hopes for speedy recovery. Old Sophy was delighted to see that it pleased Elsie, and laid it on the bed before her.
So she studied and studied, worked and worked; and she became a holy woman, an Abbess. And while she was still very young and beautiful, she was given charge of a whole convent of nuns and school-girls not much younger than herself, because she was so much wiser and better than any one else in all the countryside.
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