The House of Hardie Read Online Free PDF Page B

which was liable at any moment to explode. Her physical energy she released twice a week on the hockey field. Her intellectual energy found a more surprising outlet in study. Midge Hardie was a bluestocking.
    Like Archie Yates, many undergraduates did not even know that female students existed at Oxford. Elderly dons, who had fought a losing battle to prevent any concessions being made to them, thought them dangerous. Respectable wives and mothers thought them unladylike, and their conventional daughters thought them odd. Only within the past few weeks had permission been granted for them to take the same examinations as men in a limited number of subjects – and Midge knew that however hard-working or brilliant she might prove to be, she would still not be allowed to take a degree.
    Nor, naturally, was there any question of her becoming a member of a college. One of her friends, disguising her gender by the use of initials, had a few years earlier entered for a scholarship examination and was placed at the head of the list; but she was not allowed to accept the scholarship. Within the past five years, Somerville Hall and Lady Margaret Hall had been established to provide residence for a few talented daughters of bishops or statesmen, wishing to pursue a course of study; but their teaching had to be organized by a committee devoted to the cause of women’s education.
    Midge was not a member of either Hall. Because her home was in Oxford it would have been absurd for her to pay residence fees, so she was isolated from the community spirit which developed amongst the two small groups.But she didn’t care. She found the study of history a pleasure in itself, and there was an additional excitement in the feeling that one by one the barriers against women were falling.
    On the first Monday of Full Term in October 1885, for example, yet another door had opened to her. Dr Mackenzie, one of the most respected historians in the university, had agreed to supervise her studies. Her weekly hour with him would be called a coaching and not a tutorial, but Midge was not concerned about names. Her acceptance by such an eminent man was a triumph. She had worked her way through the list of books which he had sent her for vacation reading; but that did not prevent her from feeling nervous as well as excited as she stuck in three last hairpins to control her unruly hair, tied on her bonnet and went downstairs.
    Mrs Lindsay, one of the chaperones officially provided for the Oxford home students, was already waiting to accompany her. Midge often wondered what the chaperones thought about as they knitted their way through lectures and coachings which appeared not to interest them in the slightest. It made an amusing fantasy to imagine one of them, after several years of silent attendance, suddenly putting her name down for one of the Final Examinations and proving to have absorbed more information than any of her young charges. But it was unlikely to be Mrs Lindsay, plump and gossipy, who would fulfil that particular fantasy. They set off together from the Holywell house for the short journey to Magdalen College.
    Midge had already been warned that she and her chaperone must approach Dr Mackenzie’s rooms through a side entrance to the college, because the porter would not admit her at the front. Determined not to be late, butequally anxious neither to arrive too early nor to be seen lurking in the cloisters, she alternately hurried her companion up and held her back. So it was precisely as the hour was struck by the bells of half a dozen clocks that she reached Dr Mackenzie’s staircase.
    She was still studying the names on the boards, to discover where she should go, when a door above closed and a young man, tall and fair-haired, came down the stone steps two at a time. Instinctively Midge pressed herself back against the wall, out of sight. As an accepted pupil, punctually keeping an appointment, she had no reason to feel