And her equipment?  Well, those of us who call to mind the medley of unstable facts, untenable theories, and undesirable accomplishments, which was our substitute for education, deem her solidly informed.  If the wisdom of the college president has rescued her from domestic science, and her own common sense has steered her clear of art, she has had a chance, in four years of study, to lay the foundation of knowledge.  Her vocabulary is curiously limited.  At her age, her grandmother, if a gentlewoman, used more words, and used them better.  But then her grandmother had not associated exclusively with youthful companions.  The graduate has serious views of life, which are not amiss, and a healthy sense of humour to enliven them.  She is resourceful, honourable, and pathetically self-reliant.  In her highest and happiest development, she merits the noble words in which an old Ferrara chronicler praises the loveliest and the most maligned woman in all history:  “The lady is keen and intellectual, joyous and human, and possesses good reasoning powers.”

To balance these permanent gains, there are some temporary losses.  The college student, if she does not take up a definite line of work, is apt, for a time at least, to be unquiet.  That quality so lovingly described by Peacock as “stayathomeativeness” is her least noticeable characteristic.  The smiling discharge of uncongenial social duties, which disciplines the woman of the world, seems to her unseeing eyes a waste of time and opportunities.  She has read little, and that little, not for “human delight.”  Excellence in literature has been pointed out to her, starred and double-starred, like Baedeker’s cathedrals.  She has been taught the value of standards, and has been spared the groping of the undirected reader, who builds up her own standards slowly and hesitatingly by an endless process of comparison.  The saving in time is beneficial, and some defects in taste have been remedied.  But human delight does not respond to authority.  It is the hour of rapturous reading and the power of secret thinking which make for personal distinction.  The shipwreck of education, says Dr. William James, is to be unable, after years of study, to recognize unticketed eminence.  The best result obtainable from college, with its liberal and honourable traditions, is that training in the humanities which lifts the raw boy and girl into the ranks of the understanding; enabling them to sympathize with men’s mistakes, to feel the beauty of lost causes, the pathos of misguided epochs, “the ceaseless whisper of permanent ideals.”

The Estranging Sea

   “God bless the narrow sea which keeps her off,
    And keeps our Britain whole within itself.”

So speaks “the Tory member’s elder son,” in “The Princess":—­

   “...  God bless the narrow seas! 
    I wish they were a whole Atlantic broad”;

and the transatlantic reader, pausing to digest this conservative sentiment, wonders what difference a thousand leagues would make.  If the little strip of roughened water which divides Dover from Calais were twice the ocean’s breadth, could the division be any wider and deeper than it is?