Here we find Punch reverting to his earlier attitude. Moreover, as I have shown elsewhere, in the middle 'eighties he was in a decidedly pessimistic frame of mind, and inclined, like Porson, to "damn the scheme of things in general." The dismal mood passed, and Punch is himself again and obviously rejoicing in his own malice in the verses on an imaginary episode at Girton, where a breakdown in health, attributed to the excessive study of Browning, is traced to over-indulgence in chocolate creams by the members of the Browning Club. Punch's claim to be regarded as an expert authority where women's colleges are concerned is seriously invalidated by his confusing the sites of Newnham and Girton and, worse still, by calling the former "Nuneham" in the same year. But he redeemed himself triumphantly in his study of "The Girton Girl" (No. IX, and by far the best, of his series of "Studies from Mr. Punch's Studio") in December, 1886. I have the testimony of a distinguished Girton student of nearly twenty years later that Punch's sketch remained even then a masterly dissection of the "mentality" of the Girton Girl, and reveals an inside knowledge, both of generalities and details, which no mere man could have attained. The Girton Girl of fact is carefully distinguished from the Girton Girl of superstition. The latter is fast becoming as extinct as the Dodo:
The Girton Girl in 1886The modern schoolgirl is taking her place, no longer the giggling, flirting maiden of fiction, but an ascetic and hard-working young woman. Work has been her lot since the day when she stepped out of her cradle to combine education and amusement in the arrangement of alphabet bricks; and she looks back with a wistful incredulity to the time when the mystic letters, B.A., were to her nothing worse than the voice of the black sheep in the nursery rhyme. She inclines by instinct towards æstheticism in dress, affecting the limpest materials and the strangest hues, and making a compromise in the matter of collar and cuffs by wearing at neck and wrists a piece of very écru lace, turned down the wrong way. Her boots are the terror of stray blackbeetles, for a course of lectures on Hygienic clothing early taught her to view with horror and distrust a slim ankle and a pointed toe. She has a scholarly touch of shortsightedness, which she corrects by free use of the tortoiseshell pince-nez that dangles from her neck.
Her sense of duty is remarkable, and appalling. She virtuously accepts the onerous office of secretary to innumerable societies. Countless notices, in her bold and clear handwriting, may be seen day after day upon the College notice-boards, some of them of a sufficiently pathetic character. "Will the following members be so very good as to pay their subscriptions due the term before last to the 'Society for promoting Masculine Intelligence'?" She does not even resent her appointment as sub-officer of the Fire Brigade, the duties of which position involve a constant personal supervision of two or three repulsively oily little hand-engines, which she tends and lubricates with loving care, till she has reduced her hands and face to the colour of the brown holland apron which enshrouds the rest of her person. Not even the horrors of an alarm practice can daunt her, though she may just have settled herself to revel for an hour in the pleasant byways of Professor Sidgwick's Ethics , when screams of "Fire!" rushing footsteps, and an alarm-rattle, such as heralds a bump in the May races, compel her to leave her books, and fly to the Hall. Then the canvas buckets must be produced, her corps arranged in alphabetical order, and marched off to the supposed scene of action. All this she does in an incredibly short time; and when, at the discretion of the head captain, the pumping of engines and passing of buckets is allowed to stop, she returns to her work with fortitude and resignation past belief.
in spite of her multifarious and strenuous activities the Girton Girl is not inhuman or immune to the appeal of her less serious-minded fellow students, and the sketch ends with a really charming portrait of a witty, incorrigibly frivolous, generously hospitable and irresistibly popular member of the college. At once critical, judicial, and genial, the study is a little masterpiece of its kind. The verses, published some months earlier, on a young Spanish lady who took her doctor's degree at Barcelona at the age of nineteen, are appropriately cast in Swinburne's "Dolores" stanza (as that was her Christian name) with the refrain, "Our M.D. of Spain," but are not remarkable either as a parody or an appreciation. Much happier in every way is the well-known picture of Miss Ramsay (afterwards Mrs. Montagu Butler) entering a first-class carriage "For Ladies Only" on the occasion of her being placed Senior Classic in 1887, an exploit which caused Punch once more to raise his voice on behalf of the bestowal of degrees on women.
An even more remarkable success was achieved by Miss Philippa Fawcett, who in 1890 was declared to be "above the Senior Wrangler," and Punch , in "Topping the Tripos, or Something like a Score for the Sex," while congratulating the daughter, did not forget her father, always one of his heroes: