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"Ah, you think you'll get married, and escape that way! We all do when we're new, and pretty, and ignorant of the life. But it's fifty to one, my dear, that you won't? You won't meet many men, for one thing; and if you do, they don't like school-mistresses." "Doesn't that depend a good deal on the kind of school-mistress?" "Absolutely; but after a few years we are all more or less alike.
So those fifteen school-mistresses make up your whole social circle, do they? I wouldn't mind prophesying that you'll never want to speak a word to them out of school hours! I have a friend living in town, quite a nice woman, with a daughter about your age. Shall I ask her to send you a card?
It would be curious to trace the growth of this discontent. Ambition is deeply rooted in the female bosom. Even housemaids are actuated by an impulse to better themselves, and village school-mistresses yearn for a larger sphere.
They were mostly young school-mistresses, and whether they were of a soft and amorous make, or of a forbidding temper, they knew enough in spite of their hurts to value a young fellow whose thoughts were not running upon girls all the time.
And there were school-mistresses, too, who saw the sun through form-room windows, but felt its call all the same the call of the whole glad spring and grew restless, and nervous, and short in temper.
You and I are school-mistresses and ought to realise the difficulties of mastering difficult tasks. Don't look upon this illness as cheating you out of a pleasant holiday, dear look upon it as special training for an honours exam.!" Sophie smiled, her old twinkling smile, and stroked Claire's hand with the spray of roses. "I knew you'd say something nice!
If the object was to create a class of rural school-mistresses who would take social rank with the curate, he thought it a mistake; a school-mistress ought not to be above drinking her cup of tea in a tidy cottage with the parents of her pupils: he should prefer a capable young woman in a clean holland apron with pockets, and no gloves, to any poor young lady of genteel tastes who would expect to associate on equal terms with his wife and daughters.
Every one will immediately picture to themselves Mademoiselle Habert when they know that if she had not kept an institution for young ladies she would still have had the air of a school-mistress. School-mistresses have a way of their own in putting on their caps. Just as old Englishwomen have acquired a monopoly in turbans, school-mistresses have a monopoly of these caps.
The inmates consist of 630 children, of whom 305 are orphans, and 124 deserted by their parents, under charge of a Chaplain, a Head Master, a Medical Officer, a Roman Catholic Priest, a Governor, a Matron, six Schoolmasters, and four School-mistresses, with a numerous staff of officials, Nurses, and Teachers of Trades, receiving salaries and wages amounting to 1,800 pounds a-year, besides board.
The writers choose them from among the students, schoolmasters, and school-mistresses of the village schools, who with complete disregard of self carry on the great work of popular education in the very heart of the country, without caring about the arbitrary power which menaces them, or the moral and material conditions of their lives.
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