m Jacques, the original of Bob Jakins
in _The Mill on the Floss_. When seven years old she went to a girls'
school at Nuneaton. Her schoolmates describe her as being then a "quiet,
reserved girl, with strongly lined, almost masculine features, and a
profusion of light hair worn in curls round her head." The abundance of
her curling hair caused her much trouble, and she once cut it off, as
Maggie Tulliver did, because it would not "lie straight." "One of her
school-fellows," we are told, "recalls that the first time she sat down to
the piano she astonished her companions by the knowledge of music she had
already acquired. She mastered her lessons with an ease which excited
wonder. She read with avidity. She joined very rarely in the sports of her
companions, and her diffidence and shrinking sensibility prevented her from
forming any close friendship among her school-fellows. When she stood up in
the class, her features, heavy in repose, were lighted by eager excitement,
which found further vent in nervous movements of her hands. At this school
Marian was well taught in English, with drawing, music, and some little
French."

Leaving this school at the age of twelve, she went to that of the Misses
Franklin in Coventry, a large town a few miles distant. To the careful
training received there she was much indebted, and in after years often
spoke of it with the heartiest appreciation. One of her friends, Edith
Simcox, has given an account of this school and of Marian's studies
there. "Almost on the outskirts of the old town of Coventry, towards the
railway station, the house may still be seen, itself an old-fashioned
five-windowed, Queen Anne sort of dwelling, with a shell-shaped cornice
over the door, with an old timbered cottage facing it, and near adjoining
a quaint brick and timber building, with an oriel window thrown out upon
oak pillars. Between forty and fifty years ago, Methodist ladies kept the
school, and the name of 'little mamma,' given by her school-fellows, is
a proof that already something was to be seen of the maternal air which
characterized her in later years, and perhaps more especially in
intercourse with her own sex. Prayer meetings were in vogue among the
girls, following the example of their elders; and while taking, no doubt,
a leading part in them, she used to suffer much self-reproach about her
coldness and inability to be carried away with the same enthusiasm as
others. At the same time, nothing was