‘Yes.  When I was fifteen.’

‘And not since,’ rejoined the other, shaking her head and smiling.  ‘No, not since?’

‘Thank Heaven, no!’

’Then you are not very well able to judge this case.  I, on the other hand, can judge it with the very largest understanding.  Don’t smile so witheringly, Rhoda.  I shall neglect your advice for once.’

’You will bring this girl back, and continue teaching her as before?’

’We have no one here that knows her, and with prudence she need never be talked about by those of our friends who did.’

‘Oh, weak—­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