Page 31 - Life of Gertrude Bell

SOCIETY AND OXFORD *9
She is so unhappy because Miss Wordsworth has pronounced
diat she had better entertain him in the drawing room! It
isn’t half the same thing giving a teaparty not in one’s own
room ...
She made her first journey abroad during the year, taking her
summer holiday with ‘a suitable family’ at Weilheim in Germany.
By her second year it was clear that she would be ready to take
her degree before most of her fellow students, even though she
had gone up a year younger than most of them. Her finals in June
1888 demanded little exertion on her part. She was well prepared
for them. Only when it came to her viva voce was there cause for
concern. According to a commonly accepted account of the
proceedings, which were witnessed by her parents, she was asked
by one examiner about a German town on the left bank of the
Rhine. Gertrude, who had visited the town the year before, is
alleged to have told him: ‘I am sorry, but it is on the right. I
know, I have been there.’ But according to her tutor it was the
distinguished historian Professor S. R. Gardiner who provoked
the response, ‘I am afraid I must differ from your estimate of
Charles I.’ Pie was said to have been so taken aback that he
handed her over to another examiner without further word.
Whichever version is correct it is a faithful comment on Gertrude’s
life-long inability to resist the honest retort, whether she faced her
peers or, in terms of age and experience if not of social position,
her superiors.
The lapse made no difference to her results. She took a brilliant
‘first’, the earliest of her sex to achieve that distinction in her
subject. Her joy when she learnt the results was only diminished
when she read further down the list to discover that Mary Talbot,
who had worked so hard in company with her, had been awarded
a ‘second’.
As Gertude and her friends arrived for the last of four com­
memoration balls which marked the end of the academic year,
they heard of the death of Wilhelm I of Prussia. She was wearing
a gown of exotic green that had been delivered by her couturier
that day. She immediately returned to her room and changed into
sombre black.

While Gertrude was at Oxford there were three deaths in the
family which brought sadness and a note of dissension to a united
c