intelligence, there were other things to classify and adjust; things
which were entirely from the outside of her own life. The fragments
of common-room gossip, which it had been her fortune to hear
accidentally now and again. The half confidences of scandals, borne
on whispered breaths. The whole confidences of dormitory and study
which she had been privileged to share. All were parts of the new
and strange world, the great world which had swum into her ken.

As she sat now in the train, with some formulation of memory already
accomplished in the two hours of solitude, her first comment, spoken
half audibly, would have surprised her teachers as much as it would
have surprised herself, if she had been conscious of it; for as yet
her thinking was not self-conscious:

'Surely, I am not like that!'

It was of the women she had been thinking, not of the men. The
glimpse which she had had of her own sex had been an awakening to
her; and the awakening had not been to a pleasant world. All at once
she seemed to realise that her sex had defects--littlenesses,
meannesses, cowardices, falsenesses. That their occupations were apt
to be trivial or narrow or selfish; that their desires were earthly,
and their tastes coarse; that what she held to be goodness was apt to
be realised only as fear. That innocence was but ignorance, or at
least baffled curiosity. That . . .

A flood of shame swept over her, and instinctively she put her hands
before her burning face. As usual, she was running all at once into
extremes.