It wanted an hour of dinner. The Professor, who was never tired, led her pupil over such portions of the old Castle as could still be visited—the great tower and one or two of the terraces.
‘This was once yours,’ she said. ‘This is the castle of your ancestors. Courage, my lord; you shall win it back.’
It was in a dream that the young man spent the rest of the evening. The Professor had ordered a simple yet dainty dinner, consisting of a Thames trout, a Châteaubriand, quails, and an omelette, with some Camembert cheese, but her young charge did scanty justice to it. After dinner, when the coffee had been brought, and the door was safely shut, the Professor continued the course of lectures on ancient history, by which she had already upset the mind of her pupil, and filled his brain with dreams of a revolution more stupendous than was ever suspected by the watchful bureau of police.
Their next day’s drive brought them to Oxford. It was vacation, and the colleges were empty. Only here and there a solitary figure of some lonely Fellow or Lecturer, lingering after the rest had gone, flitted across the lawns. The solitude of the place pleased the Professor. She could ramble with her pupil about the venerable courts and talk at her ease.
‘Here,’ she said, ‘in the old days was once the seat of learning and wisdom.’
‘What is it now?’ asked her disciple, surprised. ‘Is not Oxford still the seat of learning?’
‘You must read—alas! you would not understand them—the old books before you can answer your own question. What is their political economy, their moral philosophy, their social science—of which they make so great a boast—compared with the noble scholarship, the science, the speculation of former days? How can I make you understand? There was a time when everything was advanced—by men. Science must advance or fall back. We took from men their education, and science has been forgotten. We cannot now read the old books; we do not understand the old discoveries; we cannot use the tools which they invented, the men of old. Mathematics, chemistry, physical science, geology—all these exist no longer, or else exist in such an elementary form as our ancestors would have been ashamed to acknowledge. Astronomy, which widened the heart, is neglected; medicine has become a thing of books; mechanics are forgotten——’
‘But why?’
‘Because women, who can receive, cannot create; because at no time has any woman enriched the world with a new idea, a new truth, a new discovery, a new invention; because we have undertaken the impossible.’
The Professor was silent. Never before had Lord Chester seen her so deeply moved.