The half confidences of scandals, borne on whispered breaths.

The whole confidences of dormitory and study which she had been privileged to share.

All were parts of the new and strange world, the great world which had swum into her ken.
As she sat now in the train, with some formulation of memory already accomplished in the two hours of solitude, her first comment, spoken half audibly, would have surprised her teachers as much as it would have surprised herself, if she had been conscious of it; for as yet her thinking was not self-conscious: 'Surely, I am not like that!' It was of the women she had been thinking, not of the men.

The glimpse which she had had of her own sex had been an awakening to her; and the awakening had not been to a pleasant world.

All at once she seemed to realise that her sex had defects--littlenesses, meannesses, cowardices, falsenesses.