k--weak--weak!'

'For once I must act independently.'

'Yes, and at a stroke change the whole character of your work. You
never proposed keeping a reformatory. Your aim is to help chosen girls,
who promise to be of some use in the world. This Miss Royston
represents the profitless average--no, she is below the average. Are
you so blind as to imagine that any good will ever come of such a
person? If you wish to save her from the streets, do so by all means.
But to put her among your chosen pupils is to threaten your whole
undertaking. Let it once become known--and it _would_ become
known--that a girl of that character came here, and your usefulness is
at an end. In a year's time you will have to choose between giving up
the school altogether and making it a refuge for outcasts.'

Miss Barfoot was silent. She tapped with her fingers on the table.

'Personal feeling is misleading you,' Rhoda pursued. 'Miss Royston had
a certain cleverness, I grant; but do you think I didn't know that she
would never become what you hoped? All her spare time was given to
novel-reading. If every novelist could be strangled and thrown into the
sea we should have some chance of reforming women. The girl's nature
was corrupted with sentimentality, like that of all but every woman who
is intelligent enough to read what is called the best fiction, but not
intelligent enough to understand its vice. Love--love--love; a
sickening sameness of vulgarity. What is more vulgar than the ideal of
novelists? They won't represent the actual world; it would be too dull
for their readers. In real life, how many men and women _fall in love_?
Not one in every ten thousand, I am convinced. Not one married pair in
ten thousand have felt for each other as two or three couples do in
every novel. There is the sexual instinct, of course, but that is quite
a different thing; the novelists daren't talk about that. The paltry
creatures daren't tell the one truth that would be profitable. The
result is that women imagine themselves noble and glorious when they
are most near the animals. This Miss Royston--when she rushed off to
perdition, ten to one she had in mind some idiot heroine of a book. Oh,
I tell you that you are losing sight of your first duty. There are
people enough to act the good Samaritan; _you_ have quite another task
in life. It is your work to train and encourage girls in a path as far
as possible from that of the husband-hunter. Let them marry later,