“Up the way that is narrow, the path that is steep,
With no guide for my footsteps, no help for my fear:
Only this—that He knoweth the way that I tread,
And His banner of crimson is over my head.
With the loneliness awful pressed into my soul,
With no voice for companion, no grasp of a hand—”
Yes, one cannot help wishing that an intimate friend had been at hand. One wonders whether she was even becomingly dressed: we know she would have wished to be; but she so seldom made the most of her appearance.[[48]]
In any case what happened is perfectly clear. The Professors for the most part had a deeply rooted dislike to having women students in the University: in fact, the idea of such a thing was unthinkable; but when a gifted young woman actually sat in their sanctums urging her plea, they could not bear to say No. Strictly speaking, they should have refused to see her, but did any man yet ever refuse to see a woman whose name was before the public?
One wonders as one reads the papers how many of them knew what their “powers,”—what the legal powers of the University—really were?—how many of them really wished to know? There was a comfortable conviction in the back of their minds that insuperable difficulties lay shrouded in those unprobed depths. In the meantime why not show a little kindness to a gallant girl who was as modest as anyone could be in formulating so outrageous a demand, and whose pleading—so it has been said—would have “wiled the bird from the bough”? It was after she was gone that the real horror of the situation came home to them, and that they fell back again with relief on the thought of those unprobed depths,—the legal powers of the University.
It would all be very ordinary, and sometimes rather depressing, reading, were it not that Professor Masson and some of the others, when they gave her their provisional support, really meant exactly what they would have meant in giving their support to a man—no more and no less. Their own principle, their own righteousness was involved; they were quite prepared to see women students—if so it was to be—in the University quadrangle and class-rooms; and they meant to do what in them lay to give this woman a fighting chance.