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by the well-known teacher could dull her sharp tongue; all that he said was straight out of his book, she scoffed. It “would have been said much better if he had read us the first few chapters.”
    It was a strange segregation of females and males, as though the women’s very presence would poison the atmosphere. But to Gertrude the separate table on the platform added to the awesome prestige of being privy to an Oxford lecture. And when Mr. Bright, who taught History, had them sit in the room with their backs to him, it made her laugh. The problem was his, she believed. Certainly she did not mind sitting “cheek by jowl” with a roomful of men.

    S he enjoyed the routine of lectures in the morning, lunch at LMH, reading at the Radcliffe library and private tutorials on Saturdays. Together with Mary Talbot, she penetrated the male-filled halls of the Bodleian and hunted out books under the glaring eyes of the librarian. After receiving the requested books, she wrote her parents, they felt they “really were members of the University.” Earlier, when she had first arrived and did not yet have her student pass, she had been rebuffed at the Radcliffe reading room. It had come as a shock to the young woman who got almost everything she wanted. But now she was comfortably secure. The tall, dark-eyed Mary Talbot, a niece of Prime Minister William Gladstone, soon became Gertrude’s closest comrade. Edith Langridge, who lived in the room next door and was an earlier graduate of Queen’s College, looked after her. Janet Hogarth, whose older brother David was an Oxford scholar and an archaeologist doing work in the East, would also become a lifelong friend.
    She appreciated the care of the “very nice” Miss Wordsworth, although it must be noted that the principal thought Gertrude was not a woman one could count on. “Would she be the sort of person to have in one’s bedroom if one were ill?” Miss Wordsworth asked. In fact, except for her father, Gertrude had little patience with other people’s problems. She did enjoy the respect of her tutor, Professor Hassall, who praised her work, and she was fortunate to have the company of her childhood companion Horace Marshall. Her cousin was at Trinity College at Oxford, and Gertrude received permission from Miss Wordsworth to go alone with him on “discreet little walks.” Other young men had also come into her life, and although one of her friends from home had announced her engagement, and another had already wed, for Gertrude these flirtations marked the first stirrings of her sexual awakening. She wrote to Florence about her “good friend” Mr. Raper, who took her skating, and the “fascinating” Mr. Cockerel, who invited her to his rooms for tea (always with a chaperone, of course); and on visits to London she enjoyed the company of her handsome cousin-by-marriage Billy Lascelles.
    She was thriving at Oxford and, as Horace’s mother noticed, she was even “a shade thinner.” Her posture was not yet up to par, and her shoulders were curved from her stooping. But half an hour’s walk every day with a back board would help, her aunt suggested, assuring Florence: “Every time I see the child I think her more charming. I am sure Oxford is doing much for her.”
    Oxford made her more self-reliant than she had ever been. “One goes as one likes,” Gertrude announced enthusiastically, clearly flourishing on her own. If it was a distant cry from today’s universities, where coed dormitories and shared bathrooms are the norm, it was still a far different atmosphere from the stuffy world of Queen’s College, where women were constrained by rigid Victorian customs. At Oxford it was a man’s world and the rules for men were far more lenient; Gertrude could accommodate herself to them.
    She still wrote to her family every few days, and although she suffered mood swings, sometimes ecstatically happy, sometimes inexplicably depressed, she rarely talked of being homesick.