It is the rank and file - the average woman - for whom the world has opened up so astonishingly.

The delight in natural things - colors, forms, scents - when there was nothing to restrain or hamper it, has often been a kind of intoxication, in which thought and consciousness seemed suspended.

But a girl of seventeen is not always thinking of books, especially in the Oxford summer term.

Do we all become garrulous and confidential as we approach the gates of old age? Is it that we instinctively feel, and cannot help asserting, our one advantage over the younger generation, which has so many over us? - the one advantage of time!

A modern girls' school, equipped as scores are now equipped throughout the country, was of course not to be found in 1858, when I first became a school boarder, or in 1867, when I ceased to be one.

How little those who are schoolgirls of today can realize what it was to be a schoolgirl in the fifties or the early sixties of the last century!

We believed that growth through Local Government, and perhaps through some special machinery for bringing the wishes and influence of women of all classes to bear on Parliament, other than the Parliamentary vote, was the real line of progress.