“Mr. Thornleigh, will you help me to do the fourth problem?” said Myra. “I don’t understand it a bit—but of course you know all about it.”
“I!” cried Harry, recoiling in horror, “you don’t mean it, Miss Witherington? It’s a shame to drag a fellow into this sort of thing without any warning. I couldn’t do a sum to save my life!”
“Lady Mary, do you hear? is it any shame to me not to understand it, when a University man says just the same?” cried Myra, laughing. Poor Harry felt himself most cruelly assailed, as well as ill-used altogether, by being led into this extraordinary morning’s work.
“I hope there’s more use in a University than that rot,” he said. “By Jove, Aunt Mary! I’ve often heard women had nothing to do—but if you can find no better way of passing your time than doing sums and problems, and getting up Euclid at your time of life——”
“Take him away, for heaven’s sake, Myra!” whispered Lady Mary; “he is not a fool when you talk to him. He is just like other young men, good enough in his way; but I can’t be troubled with him now.”
“Ah!” cried Myra, with an unconscious imitation of Lady Mary’s own manner, which startled, and terrified, and enchanted all the bystanders, “if the higher education was only open to us poor women, if we were not persistently kept from all means of improving ourselves—we might get in time to be as intellectual as Mr. Thornleigh,” she added, laughing in her own proper voice.
Lady Mary did not hear the end of this speech; she did not see herself in the little mimic’s satire. She was too much preoccupied, and too serious to notice the fun—and the smiles upon the faces of her friends annoyed without enlightening her.
“How frivolous we all are,” she said, turning to the eldest Miss Baker, with a sigh; “off at a tangent, as soon as ever the pressure is removed. I am sure I don’t want to think it—but sometimes I despair, and feel that we must wait for a new generation before any real education is possible among women. They are all like a set of schoolboys let loose.”
“My dear Lady Mary, that is what I am always telling you; not one in a hundred is capable of any intellectual elevation,” said the only superior person in the assembly; and they drew near the lecturer, and engaged him in a tough conversation, though he, poor man, having done his duty, and being as pleased to get it over as the audience, would have much preferred the merrier crowd who were streaming—with suppressed laughter, shaking their heads and uttering admonitions to wicked Myra—out into the sunshine, through the open door.
“Don’t do that again,” cried Phil, very red. “I say, Myra, I like you and your fun, and all that; but I’ll never speak to you again, as long as I live, if you take off mamma!”