On the Trumpington Road.

Professor Ingleby lived on the Trumpington Road, about a mile and a quarter from the Senate House. Her residence was a large and handsome house shut in by a high wall, with extensive grounds, and surrounded by high trees, so that no one could see the garden from the main road. The house was a certain mystery to the girls who on Sundays took their constitutional to Trumpington and back. Some said that the Professor was ashamed of her husband, which was the reason why he was never seen, not even at Church; others said that she kept him in such rigid discipline that she refused the poor man permission even to walk outside the grounds of the house. Her two daughters, who regularly came to church with their mother, were pretty girls, but had a submissive gentle look quite strange among the turbulent young spirits of the University. They were never seen in society; and for some reason unknown to anybody except herself, the Professor refused to enter them at any college. Meantime no one was invited to the house: when one or two ladies tried to break through the reserve so strangely maintained by the most learned Professor in the University, and left their cards, the visit was formally returned by the Professor herself, accompanied by one of her girls. But things went no further, and invitations were neither accepted nor returned. It is therefore not surprising that this learned woman, who seemed guided by none of the motives which influence most women – who was not ambitious, who refused rank, who desired not money – gradually came to bear a mythical character. She was represented as an ogre: the undergraduates, always fond of making up stories, amused themselves by inventing legends about her home life and her autocratic rule. Some, however, said that the house was haunted, her husband off his head, and her daughters weak in their intellect. There was, therefore, some astonishment when it was announced officially that the Professor was bringing Lord Chester to stay at her own house – “in perfect seclusion,” added the paper, to the disgust of all Cambridge, who would have liked to make much of this interesting young peer. However, long vacation had begun when he came up, so that the few left were either the reading undergraduates or the dons.