ould not think, she said, to Hubert's joy, how
grown men even took the trouble of electing members who had no
influence over their own party and spent most of the time in childishly
hindering the other.

She did, however, wish to gain her self-respect.

She met, now, people vastly cleverer than those who had made her feel
ignorant at home, so that her growing knowledge in no way kept pace
with her aspirations. Those old vague yearnings for something which
she used to call Being Herself were stronger now and in a form more
definite. She had learnt, in the first year of her married life, all
that a woman could learn about keeping house, but she still felt a
fool. She knew that this was not enough for her, whatever it might be
for others. She still loved to hear Hubert talking when he embarked on
Art or some really big subject; but she wished to do more than listen.

And she was learning, too.

Those who give their time to that most wonderful and noblest of all
trades, the making of a man, have lately come by the belief that
children have been taught quite wrongly. They have been stuffed with
knowledge before their bodies were grown to receive it. A deluge of
facts has been poured upon them, seated at their little desks, and most
of it has gone out through the open window into God's fresh air, where
they ought to have been themselves. They have almost burst with
learning--and never learnt to learn. They have known all Euclid at
thirteen: forgotten everything by thirty-one. They have been
specialists at seventeen and city clerks at twenty-three.

Mrs. Hallam, that crusted theorist and advocate of the old way,
unconsciously had done a curiously modern thing. She had kept her
daughter back, given her a healthy body, a mind anxious to expand and
able. Now, at twenty-two, Helena began to specialise--in learning and
in life. She had been kept back: now she leapt forward the better.

Contemptible enough perhaps to a superior eye, the salad of quite
disconnected lectures, random talks with a young artist-friend, and
pencilled passages from Mudie books, that formed this home curriculum;
but as in health, contentment, as with life itself, the will to be is
almost everything, and Helena was quite resolved to learn.

Her sole worry, in all the excitement of this onward surge into a
fuller life whose endless spaces thrilled and terrified, was that her
husband would not bear her company. Oh, he was much too clever.