Having consummated our interest, we were separated as I have already related. A couple of years at a Brighton seminary exclusively for "the daughters of gentlemen" did not eradicate the lessons in physiology I had already learned. Quite the contrary-I listened while my companions compared notes, and I found most of the girls were equally well informed.
Indeed, one or two of the elder "daughters of gentlemen" informed us of the junior classes, while we listened to the absorbing topic with rapt attention, what a naked man was like with curly hair on his belly, and a thing dangling between his legs which they described as twice the size of my brother Percy's. They went further, and one averred that she had seen and handled one. That they grow quite stiff and stood upright. In that condition men endeavored to thrust them into girls.
I listened and said nothing, and for my pains they called me a little fool and an innocent. Even at that early period of my existence, I had imbibed the instinct of reticence, so generally absent in young women.
Two years of study on all the subjects conventional and impractical to which "the daughters of gentlemen" are subjugated at my age and in such establishments afforded me ample opportunities of acquiring the rudiments of a society education. How much longer I might have remained at the Brighton seminary I know not, but an untoward accident put an end to my career there, as also to the "select establishment" itself.