‘But your classics are stronger than your mathematics.’
‘Yes, Mr. Arbuthnot.’
‘You will have a great deal of work before you can bring either to—we will not say a high, but an ordinary level.’
‘Yes, Mr. Arbuthnot.’
‘You spoke of a London degree. Let us look at London matriculation first. Children are trained at high schools for about six years, I understand, for London matriculation. And many—more than a third—of the candidates fail.’
‘I spoke of London because London gives you letters after your name. The older Universities would be more thought of in Spain. I have grandpapa’s leave to go to Newnham or Girton when I am eighteen. The first of all my governesses lives in Cambridge. So I should have one friend there.’
‘The Girton and Newnham work is on the same level as the other colleges.’
‘And you think that work beyond my reach?’
Geff Arbuthnot thought that a girl with a head so graceful, with eyes so blue, with soft brow gleaming under such a weight of dusky hair, might be content amidst the flower-scents and cedar-shades of Tintajeux Manoir, content to let Euclid and Greek particles go—to be a woman, to accept the homely, happy paths wherein women may walk unguided by exact science, or the philosophy of all the ancients.
The opinions he knew were heterodox and not to be uttered, especially by a man who, at five shillings an hour, had engaged himself to lighten the thorny road that leads to knowledge.