For she was no artist. She had not that which separates the artist from the man of ideas, or the dreamer, or the seer--expression. No poetical imagination was ever more tongue-tied. She spoke by actions, and used words only as indications of thoughts. Her speech was compared by a former student to the works of early painters, before command over the material had been obtained, but where "sheer force of character and feeling had risen over the difficulties." She was an idealist, but she could never understand the value of an abstract principle. Her interest was always in the individual, in the career, and she came to no matter, to no person, with a store of general principles ready for the case. She wanted to give women not merely learning, but a life of their own, to call out interests, to satisfy their individuality. She liked to find in them many and marked vocations, for she understood the dignity of all work and had no disdain of common things. She wanted every one to have a place and an office in life, and must perforce fit the squarest bits into a round hole, so intolerably pathetic was it to her that they should have no hole. You could not "hand her the salt or open the door for her" without receiving "some recognition of your individuality" a student said of her. This recognition of the individuality of women and of the human and practical sides of higher intellectual training was her contribution to the movement in which she took so great a part. And the contribution was all important.
She had besides a strong belief in the value of academic advantages. It was in order that some crumbs of things academic might fall to the teachers in elementary schools, that she arranged the summer meetings of University Extension Lecture students. Miss dough's belief in happiness--in people's right to happiness--was the source of most delightful qualities. She had waited, she said, for her own till she was fifty years old, and it had come to her with Newnham. She insisted on the little pleasures "which bring joy by the way." Nothing was too small to engage her own attention, and her educational qualities lay in awaking similar interest in others, as her moral disposition led her to share and so to increase the common stock of interests and supports in life. And so on the rare occasions when she left the college boundaries she would recount to the students at her table or in her room all that had interested her during her absence. She busied herself over the minutest details of their health or well-being, and finding that two students made a simple supper upstairs on Sunday, she arrived at the door carrying a good-sized table, because she had noticed there was none convenient for the purpose. Newnham was for her a big house, and the students were grown-up daughters in a delightful family not yet realised elsewhere, each of whom had her own place in the world, her own personal life, its rights and liberties. Yet the "head" who habitually intervened in small college matters (with a total lack of power of organisation, which in the administration of Newnham she left to others) and who was frequently agitated and over anxious about them, balanced these things by a life-long habit of interest in large public affairs, and, what was more strange, by a very real serenity. She did not think the individual should be sacrificed to the college, or "to a cause, however good." She never lived in a small milieu--even Newnham.