Page:The Higher Education of Women.djvu/164

 She spends the greater part of her time in intercourse with young and immature minds, only varied by unequal association with the parents or grown-up brothers and sisters of her pupils. The society of her equals in age and position is entirely wanting, and the natural tendency of such mental solitude is to produce childishness, angularity, and narrow-mindedness. It must be a very strong character indeed which can do without the wholesome trituration and the expansive influence of equal companionship, and this is just what a governess cannot have. A great effort may be made to treat her as one of the family, but she does not really belong to the people, or even to their class. She is always a bird of passage, and in this