We have hundreds more books for your enjoyment. Read them all!
|
|
During her school days, especially her earlier school days, the
world had been very explicit with her, telling her what to do,
what not to do, giving her lessons to learn and games to play and
interests of the most suitable and various kinds. Presently she
woke up to the fact that there was a considerable group of
interests called being in love and getting married, with certain
attractive and amusing subsidiary developments, such as
flirtation and "being interested" in people of the opposite sex.
She approached this field with her usual liveliness of
apprehension. But here she met with a check. These interests
her world promptly, through the agency of schoolmistresses, older
school-mates, her aunt, and a number of other responsible and
authoritative people, assured her she must on no account think
about. Miss Moffatt, the history and moral instruction mistress,
was particularly explicit upon this score, and they all agreed in
indicating contempt and pity for girls whose minds ran on such
matters, and who betrayed it in their conversation or dress or
bearing. It was, in fact, a group of interests quite unlike any
other group, peculiar and special, and one to be thoroughly
ashamed of. Nevertheless, Ann Veronica found it a difficult
matter not to think of these things. However having a
considerable amount of pride, she decided she would disavow these
undesirable topics and keep her mind away from them just as far
as she could, but it left her at the end of her school days with
that wrapped feeling I have described, and rather at loose ends.
The world, she discovered, with these matters barred had no
particular place for her at all, nothing for her to do, except a
functionless existence varied by calls, tennis, selected novels,
walks, and dusting in her father's house. She thought study
would be better. She was a clever girl, the best of her year in
the High School, and she made a valiant fight for Somerville or
Newnham but her father had met and argued with a Somerville girl
at a friend's dinner-table and he thought that sort of thing
unsexed a woman. He said simply that he wanted her to live at
home. There was a certain amount of disputation, and meanwhile
she went on at school. They compromised at length on the science
course at the Tredgold Women's College--she had already
matriculated into London University from school--she came of age,
and she bickered with her aunt for latch-key privileges on the
strength of that and her season ticket. Shamefaced curiosities
began to come back into her mind, thinly disguised as literature
and art. She read voraciously, and presently, because of her
aunt's censorship, she took to smuggling any books she thought
might be prohibited instead of bringing them home openly, and she
went to the theatre whenever she could produce an acceptable
friend to accompany her. She passed her general science
examination with double honors and specialized in science. She
happened to have an acute sense of form and unusual mental
lucidity, and she found in biology, and particularly in
comparative anatomy, a very considerable interest, albeit the
illumination it cast upon her personal life was not altogether
direct. She dissected well, and in a year she found herself
chafing at the limitations of the lady B. Sc. who retailed a
store of faded learning in the Tredgold laboratory. She had
already realized that this instructress was hopelessly wrong and
foggy--it is the test of the good comparative anatomist--upon the
skull. She discovered a desire to enter as a student in the
Imperial College at Westminster, where Russell taught, and go on
with her work at the fountain-head.
|