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Instead, her letters were filled with reports of her classes and her success at extracurricular activities: playing tennis against Somerville, Oxford’s only other women’s college; arguing at the Debating Society, where her team won the case for women’s right to vote (only a few years later she would fight against the suffragettes); swimming, rowing, playing hockey, acting, dancing and, though she was never religious, attending church. Her younger half-sister Elsa noted later that a sense of security pervaded Gertrude’s letters: “There is no vestige of anxiety about the future. Why should there be? Gertrude’s experience of life had been that she had only to want something in order to get it.”
    She still asked Florence for advice on fiction and consulted her more and more about clothes. “I wish you would tell me what to have for a best dress this summer,” she begged. “It must be very smart.” As Gertrude came into her own, her tense relationship with Florence eased. She praised Florence as a mother and told her, after a country weekend with the family of a friend: “I’m very glad you aren’t like Mrs. Kynston. She never takes any interest at all in what her daughters are doing.”
    While Florence was in London, working on the production of one of her plays, Gertrude wrote to Hugh, engaging in long discussions about history, philosophy and politics. “Will you disinherit me when I tell you that I don’t believe in competition at all?” she teased the great industrialist. “No, you will crush me by pointing out that my knowledge of political economy is exactly three weeks old!” When Hugh’s mother died, Gertrude penned him a note of sympathy, but carelessly forgot to mail it. Her father was hurt, and she answered endearingly: “You must know, whether you get letters or not, that anything that makes you sorry makes me sorry too and that I care very much for whatever you care for.” Only a few months later, when a manager of the coal mines died, Hugh was upset that he had not been with the man. “Your just being too late to see him is bitterly sad,” Gertrude wrote prophetically. “Oh you dear father, I know so well what it would be to have to die without you there, and never to see you again.”

    A s school continued, the work piled up: in one week, in addition to a dozen lectures to attend and six essays to write for her tutor, she was assigned to read a biography of Richard III, a two-volume biography of Henry VIII and Stubbs’s history from Edward IV to Edward V. “Now I ask you, is that possible?” she moaned, but her tone revealed that she could easily handle the load. “Don’t think I don’t like it,” she told her mother. She could hardly have liked it more; it confirmed her superior intelligence and reinforced her confidence; and if anyone doubted her opinion, she would cut him off with her favorite retort: “Well, you know, my father says so.” Janet Hogarth commented later that Gertrude “was always an odd mixture of maturity and childishness, grown-up in her judgments of men and affairs, child-like in her certainties, and most engaging in her entire belief in her father and the vivid intellectual world in which she had been brought up.”
    By the end of her second year, and twelve months ahead of schedule, she prepared eagerly for Schools, her last written examinations at Oxford. “It’s wildly exciting,” she wrote to her parents. “I feel like a kind of gambler who is staking his last sixpence!” On the first day of exams, she waited anxiously with the others in the entry hall until an electric bell gonged and a voice rang out: “Gentlemen for the History school, North School; to the left, Gentlemen.” As the men went off, Gertrude kept a discreet distance from them and rushed up a back staircase. She made her way to the women’s table in the last row of the room and promptly opened the exam book. Most of the questions were “delightful,” she announced later to