“No one,” Bridget answered; “I thought them myself, after the Scripture lessons at school.”
“Happy and successful teachers!” he murmured ironically. “That being the case, Miss Bid, may I presume to inquire what is your philosophy of life?”
There was a touch of earnestness under the lightness of his tone, to which the girl immediately responded.
“Oh! I don’t know,” she replied with a deep breath.
She crossed the room slowly, as if in thought, and came and stood gravely before the fire, holding out her hands mechanically to the blaze.
“I don’t know,” she repeated. “It’s so puzzling. If it could be so, I think—as we’re only sure of this life—that we ought to make the best of it. Use it in the way our natures prompt us to use it, don’t you? I mean we oughtn’t to be afraid to be ourselves, not to let people and opinions hinder us. That’s what ought to be. But it can’t be, often,” she added bitterly. “We have affections, we love people who have nothing in common with us. It’s a great bother, but it is so. Often I wish I didn’t, that I might take my own way, lead my own life, be myself. But one can’t, one can’t. It wouldn’t be you, after all, if you trampled other people under foot, and yet how they hinder you, how they—” she paused, trembling a little, and flushing.
“Ibsen has surely not arrived at the Rilchester Free Library, has he?” the Professor inquired.
“Ibsen?” she repeated. “Who is Ibsen? I never heard of him.”
“You will,” he said. “Seven years hence, you will probably be in the thick of a fight that has already begun, Miss Bridget. But to return to our muttons. What do you want to do? What would you do if you could? Is it Girton? Newnham? Medical student, or hospital nurse?”
“Neither of those things, I think. Certainly not Girton or Newnham. I don’t know why, but I’m not drawn to that idea. I want—life;—to know how things go on in the world amongst men and women. I want the whole world, not the set of High School girls to whom life means the mathematical tripos. I want to know the men and women who travel, who write books, who think things, who are interesting—”