GROVES OF ACADEME
After that keen disappointment about the baby's forgetting her, although she excused it to herself, arguing that at twenty months one cannot be expected to have a long memory, Mary was more reconciled to the changed conditions of her life.
"I hope we are going to be together for a good many years," Lady Anne said, "and presently you must be able to play and sing to me, to read to me and take an interest in the things in which I am interested. You are to go to school, Mary."
So Mary went to school, first to the Queen's Preparatory School, then to the Queen's College. Her years there were very happy ones, especially those years at the College, after she had found her feet and made friends, and gained confidence in herself and the world.
"She sucks up knowledge as a sponge sucks up water," was the report of the Principal, Miss Merton, to the delighted Lady Anne. "I hope Lady Anne, that you will permit her to go in for her B.A. I should not be surprised, indeed, if she captured a fellowship."
"No fellowships," Lady Anne said, firmly. "What would she do with a fellowship? I propose, as soon as she has done with you, to take her abroad. I have a mind to see the world again through young eyes. And it will put the coping-stone on her education. I shouldn't dare leave her too long with you. Learning so often destroys a woman's imagination. They work too hard, I suppose. It doesn't seem to come natural to them yet as it does to men."
"There's no question of Mary's working too hard," the Lady Principal said, bearing these hard sayings of Lady Anne's with composure. "She has fine brains. Whatever she wants in an intellectual way she can come at easily."
Mary, indeed, took her B.A. without over-much burning of the midnight oil. Afterwards she always spoke with the tenderest affection of her old school-days. She recalled with delight the spacious class-rooms, the old garden with its great woodland trees, and the tiny rooms of the girls who were in residence at the College, with their quaint and pretty adornments—the place of so much young camaraderie and soaring ambition and happy emulation. "I can hardly remember that anyone was ever unkind," she used to say long afterwards.
As a matter of fact, the band of elder students with whom Mary was connected in her latter days at the College had a generous enthusiasm for her beauty, taking it as in a sense a credit to themselves.
"You will be a living answer to them," said Jessie Baynes, who was small and plain-looking, "when they say that learned women are always ugly."