Page:Lesbia Newman - Dalton - 1889.djvu/270

 a class of students chosen only for their fitness to the ends in view, and unhampered by other considerations. It was a fair compact; the college to provide first-rate education, living, and healthy sports; the girls, on their part, to wear the college uniform during their resident membership, and to do their best to reform outside society on their own model. Thus for five years each student at Ousebridge had guaranteed to her a life of work and recreation such as girls have a right to expect—a right which was yielded to them now, probably for the first time in human history.

The colour chosen for the university was a rich crimson, as Oxford and Cambridge have their respective blues; the badge was an oval with a golden arrow in it, pointing upwards, and the word Deira below it. The uniform for Foundation College, which was filled mostly with younger girls, was a dark-blue serge knicker suit with crimson beretta cap and stockings, but other colleges could have their own colours; the gown, of course, was common to all, for the hours of study and lectures in school, and for walking about the town. University officers were, of course, appointed to see that the liberty of students to go almost where they pleased did not lead to abuses and scandal, which would have weakened the influence it was the main object of the institution to extend. We say the main object, because mere learning, of one sort and another, could be acquired elsewhere. Learned women who were learned and nothing more, would be no new thing; the object now was not only to make them learned and intelligent in their respective chosen callings, but also to eradicate from them what the world, but a few years back, had miscalled ‘womanliness,’—to harden them in character as in muscle,—to bruise out of them their frivolity and soft-headedness, and silly mannerisms and coquetry and mischievous thoughtlessness and all other pseudo-feminine habits, the heritage of prehistoric