HIGH-SCHOOL FOR GIRLS IN ENGLAND. 233 
pany was exceedingly fortunate in the choice of its first head mistresses. 
The demand created the supply. Women of culture and power saw what 
a great future opened before them, if England responded to the appeal. 
Twenty years ago, the notion that a well-born and well-bred girl should 
sive up a comfortable home and take to a profession, was highly repug- 
aant fo most parents and relations. And the idea that a girl who need 
10t work for her bread should take to the profession of teaching, seemed 
:0 the last degree impossible. Well might the National Union speak of 
“raising the social status of female teachers.” 
There were brilliant exceptions fo the general rule—women who by 
torce of character, nobility of aims, and remarkable talents had overridden 
all prejudice, whose schools were centers of life, whose private pupils 
were among the most cultivated and intelligent of their generation. But 
in the great majority of cases a woman usually taught because she could 
do nothing else ; not from ‘conviction, not from enthusiasm. The “art 
of teaching ” was unknown to her. The noblest profession a woman can 
take up, that of developing the minds and characters of our future women, 
brought a loss of caste to the greater part of those who adopted it. 
Happily, some few parents were wise enough to see that even pleasant 
lives, if idle ones, were utterly unsatisfying to girls touched by the eager 
modern spirit, and that the emptiness of such lives was fruitful of 
morbid views of life and religion, of discontent, of ill-health, of hysteria 
in all its insidious and fatal forms. They saw that what their daughters 
aeeded was occupation. They determined to brave the prejudice of gen- 
erations, and allow them to teach. All honor to such pioneers! Their 
path was not a smooth one. But parents and children have had their 
reward. The parents find their girls are no less devoted daughters, no 
less refined women, because they have an honorable and satisfying calling. 
And the public at large is beginning to see that it is not only possible for 
a high-school mistress to keep her position in the best society in the land, 
but to make for herself a very fine career. A really first-rate high-school 
is a center of cultivation to its town. Its mistresses are welcome guests, 
not only in the homes of their pupils, but in all houses where intelligence 
and refinement are valued. 
One of the most delightful features of high-school life is the relation 
between the girls and mistresses, who are at the same time teachers 
and friends. They throw themselves into the girls’ lives with a devotion 
and enthusiasm which is beyond all praise. Graduates of one or other 
aniversity, as many of them are—often old high-school girls themselves— 
they know what high-school girls need. Their interest in their pupils 
extends far beyond the walls of the classroom. 
[t is they who help the girls to organize the school games ; they who, 
on the Saturday holiday, take their class far beyond the limits of the 
town, to get primroses, or for field botany, or a tea-party in the woods.