this theory
of my innate and virginal piety.

6

It was against this harsh and crude Staffordshire background that
I think I must have seen Margaret for the first time. I say I think
because it is quite possible that we had passed each other in the
streets of Cambridge, no doubt with that affectation of mutual disregard
which was once customary between undergraduates and Newnham girls. But
if that was so I had noted nothing of the slender graciousness that
shone out so pleasingly against the bleaker midland surroundings.

She was a younger schoolfellow of my cousins', and the step-daughter
of Seddon, a prominent solicitor of Burslem. She was not only not in
my cousins' generation but not in their set, she was one of a small
hardworking group who kept immaculate note-books, and did as much as is
humanly possible of that insensate pile of written work that the Girls'
Public School movement has inflicted upon school-girls. She really
learnt French and German admirably and thoroughly, she got as far in
mathematics as an unflinching industry can carry any one with no great
natural aptitude, and she went up to Bennett Hall, Newnham, after the
usual conflict with her family, to work for the History Tripos.

There in her third year she made herself thoroughly ill through
overwork, so ill that she had to give up Newnham altogether and go
abroad with her stepmother. She made herself ill, as so many girls do
in those university colleges, through the badness of her home and school
training. She thought study must needs be a hard straining of the mind.
She worried her work, she gave herself no leisure to see it as a whole,
she felt herself not making headway and she cut her games and exercise
in order to increase her hours of toil, and worked into the night. She
carried a knack of laborious thoroughness into the blind alleys and
inessentials of her subject. It didn't need the badness of the food for
which Bennett Hall is celebrated and the remarkable dietary of nocturnal
cocoa, cakes and soft biscuits with which the girls have supplemented
it, to ensure her collapse. Her mother brought her home, fretting and
distressed, and then finding her hopelessly unhappy at home, took her
and her half-brother, a rather ailing youngster of ten who died three
years later, for a journey to Italy.

Italy did much to assuage Margaret's chagrin. I think all three of them
had a very good time there. At home Mr. Seddon, her step-father, play