Now that the time was drawing so near, those girls who were working for prizes found themselves fully occupied from morning to night. In play-hours even, girls would be seen with their heads bent over their books, and, between the prizes and the acting, no little bees in any hive could be more constantly employed than were these young girls just now.
No happiness is, after all, to be compared to the happiness of healthful occupation. Busy people have no time to fret and no time to grumble. According to our old friend, Dr Watts, people who are healthily busy have also no time to be naughty, for the old doctor says that it is for idle hands that mischief is prepared.
Be that as it may, and there is great truth in it, some naughty sprites, some bad fairies, were flitting around and about that apparently peaceful atmosphere. That sunny home, governed by all that was sweet and good, was not without its serpent.
Of all the prizes which attracted interest and aroused competition, the prize for English composition was this year the most popular. In the first place, this was known to be Mrs Willis’s own favourite subject. She had a great wish that her girls should write intelligibly—she had a greater wish that, if possible, they should think.
“Never was there so much written and printed,” she was often heard to say; “but can anyone show me a book with thoughts in it? Can anyone show me, unless as a rare exception, a book which will live? Oh, yes, these books which issue from the press in thousands are, many of them, very smart, a great many of them clever, but they are thrown off too quickly. All great things, great books amongst them, must be evolved slowly.”
Then she would tell her pupils what she considered the reason of this.
“In these days,” she would say, “all girls are what is called highly educated. Girls and boys alike must go in for competitive examinations, must take out diplomas, and must pass certain standards of excellence. The system is cramming from beginning to end. There is no time for reflection. In short, my dear girls, you swallow a great deal, but you do not digest your intellectual food.”
Mrs Willis hailed with pleasure any little dawnings of real thought in her girls’ prize essays. More than once she bestowed the prize upon the essay which seemed to the girls the most crude and unfinished.
“Never mind,” she would say, “here is an idea—or at least half an idea. This little bit of composition is original, and not, at best, a poor imitation of Sir Walter Scott or Lord Macaulay.”
Thus the girls found a strong stimulus to be their real selves in these little essays, and the best of them chose their subject and let it ferment in their brains without the aid of books, except for the more technical parts.