MARY ASTERISK.
[To THE EDITOR OF THE "ISPECTA70E•"]
SIR,—On p. 50 of your last issue I read: "It is certainly an open question whether the highly taught woman of to-day is as charming as was her grandmother." I am afraid I do not catch the writer's meaning, and I am hoping you will kindly make it clearer Mary Asterisk is undoubtedly one of the highly taught women of to-day. She has just taken a First in the Classical Tripos. So did her mother before her. So did that mother's mother before her, in the early days of Girton and Newnham. Mary Asterisk and her mother and grandmother are all charming, more or less. It is true that her grandmother is the most so of the three, but this is more likely to be a result of the wisdom and sympathy which life and sorrow bring than of any other cause. It certainly can have no possible connexion with height or otherwise of teach- ing, as all three women have had exactly the same kind of. training, with exactly the same kind of result. Mary Asterisk's grandmother was contemporary with Miss Jane Harrison, Mrs. Alfred Marshall, Mrs. Humphry Ward, Mrs. H. G-. Woods, Mrs. Meynell, Mrs. Edward Garnett, &c., &c., whose living contemporaries would not be at all surprised to hear them spoken of as " charming," but would be dumb with astonishment at reading your• writer's suggestion that they were not " highly taught " !—I am, Sir, &c.,
AN ANTIQUE.
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