“You are right,” Alan answered briskly, for the point was a pet one with him.  “I was an Oxford man myself, and I know that servitude.  When I go up to Oxford now and see the girls who are being ground in the mill at Somerville, I’m heartily sorry for them.  It’s worse for them than for us; they miss the only part of university life that has educational value.  When we men were undergraduates, we lived our whole lives, lived them all round, developing equally every fibre of our natures.  We read Plato, and Aristotle, and John Stuart Mill, to be sure,—­and I’m not quite certain we got much good from them; but then our talk and thought were not all of books, and of what we spelt out in them.  We rowed on the river, we played in the cricket-field, we lounged in the billiard-rooms, we ran up to town for the day, we had wine in one another’s rooms after hall in the evening, and behaved like young fools, and threw oranges wildly at one another’s heads, and generally enjoyed ourselves.  It was all very silly and irrational, no doubt, but it was life, it was reality; while the pretended earnestness of those pallid Somerville girls is all an affectation of one-sided culture.”

“That’s just it,” Herminia answered, leaning back on the rustic seat like David’s Madame Recamier.  “You put your finger on the real blot when you said those words, developing equally every fibre of your natures.  That’s what nobody yet wants us women to do.  They’re trying hard enough to develop us intellectually; but morally and socially they want to mew us up just as close as ever.  And they won’t succeed.  The zenana must go.  Sooner or later, I’m sure, if you begin by educating women, you must end by emancipating them.”

“So I think too,” Alan answered, growing every moment more interested.  “And for my part, it’s the emancipation, not the mere education, that most appeals to me.”

“Yes, I’ve always felt that,” Herminia went on, letting herself out more freely, for she felt she was face to face with a sympathetic listener.  “And for that reason, it’s the question of social and moral emancipation that interests me far more than the mere political one,—­woman’s rights as they call it.  Of course I’m a member of all the woman’s franchise leagues and everything of that sort,—­they can’t afford to do without a single friend’s name on their lists at present; but the vote is a matter that troubles me little in itself, what I want is to see women made fit to use it.  After all, political life fills but a small and unimportant part in our total existence.  It’s the perpetual pressure of social and ethical restrictions that most weighs down women.”

Alan paused and looked hard at her.  “And they tell me,” he said in a slow voice, “you’re the Dean of Dunwich’s daughter!”

Herminia laughed lightly,—­a ringing girlish laugh.  Alan noticed it with pleasure.  He felt at once that the iron of Girton had not entered into her soul, as into so many of our modern young women’s.  There was vitality enough left in her for a genuine laugh of innocent amusement.  “Oh yes,” she said, merrily; “that’s what I always answer to all possible objectors to my ways and ideas.  I reply with dignity, ’I was brought up in the family of a clergyman of the Church of England.’”