Ursula had only two more terms at school. She was studying
for her matriculation examination. It was dreary work, for she
had very little intelligence when she was disjointed from
happiness. Stubbornness and a consciousness of impending fate
kept her half-heartedly pinned to it. She knew that soon she
would want to become a self-responsible person, and her dread
was that she would be prevented. An all-containing will in her
for complete independence, complete social independence,
complete independence from any personal authority, kept her
dullishly at her studies. For she knew that she had always her
price of ransom--her femaleness. She was always a woman,
and what she could not get because she was a human being, fellow
to the rest of mankind, she would get because she was a female,
other than the man. In her femaleness she felt a secret riches,
a reserve, she had always the price of freedom.
However, she was sufficiently reserved about this last
resource. The other things should be tried first. There was the
mysterious man's world to be adventured upon, the world of daily
work and duty, and existence as a working member of the
community. Against this she had a subtle grudge. She wanted to
make her conquest also of this man's world.
So she ground away at her work, never giving it up. Some
things she liked. Her subjects were English, Latin, French,
mathematics and history. Once she knew how to read French and
Latin, the syntax bored her. Most tedious was the close study of
English literature. Why should one remember the things one read?
Something in mathematics, their cold absoluteness, fascinated
her, but the actual practice was tedious. Some people in history
puzzled her and made her ponder, but the political parts angered
her, and she hated ministers. Only in odd streaks did she get a
poignant sense of acquisition and enrichment and enlarging from
her studies; one afternoon, reading As You Like It; once when,
with her blood, she heard a passage of Latin, and she knew how
the blood beat in a Roman's body; so that ever after she felt
she knew the Romans by contact. She enjoyed the vagaries of
English Grammar, because it gave her pleasure to detect the live
movements of words and sentences; and mathematics, the very
sight of the letters in Algebra, had a real lure for her.
She felt so much and so confusedly at this time, that her
face got a queer, wondering, half-scared look, as if she were
not sure what might seize upon her at any moment out of the
unknown.
Odd little bits of information stirred unfathomable passion
in her. When she knew that in the tiny brown buds of autumn were
folded, minute and complete, the finished flowers of the summer
nine months hence, tiny, folded up, and left there waiting, a
flash of triumph and love went over her.