Miss Hypatia: "Yes, now that we are gradually educating ourselves up to your level, you Men ought at least to meet us halfway."
The Professor: "Meet you halfway? How? By gradually uneducating ourselves down to yours?"
Feline Amenities
In 1890, again, the amusing series of "Feline amenities" continued for some years, though they are a tribute to the wit of women, are invariably based on a denial of the quality of magnanimity. In this context I am minded to include a curiosity, dating from the year 1886, in the shape of an imaginary letter signed "Elizabeth Fry Romper," which is of interest as showing the change in the attitude of philanthropic women during the century. The writer describes how "of course on the hottest day of the whole summer" she was told off to take a lot of Sunday school girls for "a day in the country" to Greenwich, "which is supposed to have an elevating effect upon them for the rest of the year." Of all the disagreeable things she ever has to do, this is "far the worst." The picture given is decidedly realistic:—
It is no joke waiting for an hour at a suburban station, with eighty "young girls"—real young girls—pouring in by detachments, all in the wildest state of excitement, and decked with the entire contents of their jewel-cases. Of course, the first thing they did was to rush, helter-skelter, into a wrong train, and all the railway staff hardly sufficed to pull them out again before the train started. I had a whole compartment to look after, and felt rather nervous at the thought that the next one was filled with men—smoking shocking tobacco, by the way—and that the talk was distinctly audible.
I was truly thankful to reach Greenwich, and trusted that the girls might be fully occupied in getting tea, and that the heavy cake might calm down their excitement a little. So we all set to with a great deal of unnecessary bustle, and were flattering our elderly hearts that everything was going off splendidly, when, on the bell being rung—we had brought one on purpose—for the girls to be seated, the Superintendent looked round for the head girl to lead the singing grace. Instead of pious music of any sort, our ears were greeted with a shout of discordant laughter, which was found to proceed from some broken ground in the distance, where the whole of our first class were engaged in playing Kiss in the Ring with a party of soldiers from the neighbouring barracks. My dear, if you could have seen the picture, you would never have forgotten it. I thought I should have died of laughing on the spot. The hot, dishevelled, romping girls, and the smart soldiers, quite unconscious of the awful face of the Superintendent, as she advanced towards them, and the way the damsels scuttered off as she let fall a few words of rebuke—it was the funniest thing I ever saw. She succeeded in driving her flock, sheepish but giggling, before her; all but one, who stoutly declined to leave her soldier, declaring she didn't want no tea, but would 'ave a spree in the merry-go-round with 'im. A separation was ultimately effected, but the gloom that hung over that meal I never shall forget. It was a mercy everyone else took it so seriously, or I couldn't have held out; as it was, when I got home, I laughed myself nearly into a fit.
The combination of duty, detachment and a sense of humour is not commonly credited to Victorian girls. But the problems that had to be tackled were very much the same, and so was human nature.
[3] The quotation reminds me that, when I was an undergraduate at Oxford at this time, the handmaiden at a certain lodgings was called "Annie Katie" by successive generations of undergraduates. These were not her baptismal names: they had been bestowed upon her by an ingenious scholar because her surname was Macan.