gave me the canoe when she went away. Before
that I used to row in a boat--that is, before I went to college."

"College? What college? Girton?"

"Oh, no, nothing half so grand. It was a college where you get
certificates that you are qualified to be a mistress in a Board school.
I wish it had been Girton."

"Do you?"--you are too good for that, he was going to add, but changed
it to--"I think you were as well away. I don't care about the Girton
stamp; those of them whom I have known are so hard."

"So much the better for them," she answered. "I should like to be hard
as a stone; a stone cannot feel. Don't you think that women ought to
learn, then?"

"Do you?" he asked.

"Yes, certainly."

"Have you learnt anything?"

"I have taught myself a little and picked up something at the college.
But I have no real knowledge, only a smattering of things."

"What do you know--French and German?"

"Yes."

"Latin?"

"Yes, I know something of it."

"Greek?"

"I can read it fairly, but I am not a Greek scholar."

"Mathematics?"

"No, I gave them up. There is no human nature about mathematics. They
work everything to a fixed conclusion that must result. Life is not like
that; what ought to be a square comes out a right angle, and _x_ always
equals an unknown quantity, which is never ascertained till you are
dead."

"Good gracious!" thought Geoffrey to himself between the strokes of the
paddle, "what an extraordinary girl. A flesh-and-blood blue-stocking,
and a lovely one into the bargain. At any rate I will bowl her out this
time."

"Perhaps you have read law too?" he said with suppressed sarcasm.

"I have read some," she answered calmly. "I like law, especially Equity
law; it is so subtle, and there is such a mass of it built upon such
a small foundation. It is like an overgrown mushroom, and the top will
fall off one day, however hard the lawyers try to prop it up. Perhaps
you can tell me----"

"No, I'm sure I cannot," he answered. "I'm not a Chancery man. I am
Common law, and _I_ don't take all knowledge for _my_ province. You
positively alarm me, Miss Granger. I wonder that the canoe does not sink
beneath so much learning."

"Do I?" she answered sweetly. "I am glad that I have lived to frighten
somebody. I meant that I like Equity to study; but if I were a
barrister, I would be Common law, because there is so much more life
and struggle about it. Existence is not worth having unless one is
strugglin