She had been at Newnham two years, and she was twenty now, and wore glasses, but, alas! not 'sweet and twenty.' She looked exactly like a girl who had used up all her brains.
'I think you have made a mistake,' she said, as she knelt upon the ground unpacking Lucy's books, 'in taking Classics. You should take the Natural Science Tripos. Classics are a thing of the past. They are quite worn out. They will be superseded altogether shortly. Soon—very soon—Latin and Greek will not be compulsory in the examinations; we shall have more useful subjects. Life is so short—so very short' (she was just twenty)—'that we have no time for learning things that will not help us in the rush. Life is getting more of a rush every day, and Science is the only thing that can help us forward. There is no knowing where Science will lead us!'
She clasped her hands, and gasped at the bare thought of it.
'No,' said Lucy, in a low-spirited way.
She hadn't the least interest where Science was going to lead the girl on the floor—it wasn't likely to lead her very far—but she did object to see her pet Classics turned out of the box in that scornful way.
'You will learn all this trash,' the girl continued, opening the pages of Lucy's Euripides and letting the leaves drop through her fingers as if they were not of very much account, 'and you will pore over these rubbishy stories of a quite barbarous age—stories and fables and metamorphoses that, if they were written at the present time, would lay the writer open to a prosecution for perverting the public morals. You will soak your mind with all this nonsense and impurity, and you will think that you have attained culture. Oh, to think how girls waste their lives!'
'I'm sure Classics are ever so much nicer than Natural Science,' Lucy said with some spirit. 'Look at the dreadful subjects you have to study! and to sit side by side with men in lecture-rooms, and listen to lectures on things most women would blush to speak of! Oh, I wouldn't be a Natural Science student for the world!'
The atmosphere of Newnham was beginning to tell. A few hours ago Lucy was as meek as a mouse, and if anyone had slapped her on one cheek she would have been quite ready to offer the other. Now she had plucked up sufficient spirit to defend her choice of a Tripos.
If Newnham doesn't do anything else for a girl, it teaches her to take her own part.