A Letter written on Mar 2, 1929

The Women's Christian College

College Road
Madras S.W.

Telegrams: Discipula, Madras
Telephone: No. 2058
Principal: Miss Eleanor McDougall, M.A., D.Litt.

2nd March 1929

My dear Miss Turner

Your long, kind and most interesting letter letter has lain in my drawer for several months, at first because I wanted to watch Eleanor Mason's work a little while before replying, and then because mail days have come and gone like flashes and the Christmas vacation, when I usually make up arrears, was taken up with the session of the National Christian Council in the College. But now I write at last to thank you very much for taking the trouble to write so fully to me.

I think that this piece of work on which Eleanor has been engaged has been of very great value to her and to the whole College as well as thevalue [sic] it may possess as a contribution to the enquiry which is going on in America. I am very glad that we have been able to assign some money which came to us as an unexpected windfall, to the expenses of her research, as she ought not to provide from for them from her own slender means, though she was most willing in her enthusiasm to do so. She has gone on very steadily week after week, and I am sure that the interest of it has been very good for her health. She has been much stronger and better this year than in any year of her first period and now that the College work is nearly at an end and she has three months of holiday before her, I feel most thankful onn her behalf. As she is now becoming one of our Senior members of Staff, important functions such as the Secretarysgip [sic] of the Council have fallen to her, and she has discharged them with great ability and thoroughness, so that it cannot be said that her devotion to research has made her less of a help to the rest of us.

We are all much interested in what she is doing, and it is a great thing for the students to see some research work actually in process and to realise that additions are still being made to knowledge. They are very apt to regard knowledge as a mass of ascertained facts of which you must learn as many as the University requires for the acquisition of a degree, just as you pay a certain number of coins for something which you buy, and to see Miss Mason working day after day at something which is simply an addition to knowledge and will bring her no personal advantage, is an inspiration which the best of them recognise. They are very proud of what she is doing and enquire eagerly about her results, and altogether her work is bringing new life and fresh air into their mental world.

Eleanor remains rather thin, though not so thin as she was, but she looks well and strong and has hardly missed a day from her teaching. She keeps up her other interests too, and is very popular with the students.

We think with affectionate regret of D.E. Williams whom we all liked so much. I do wish we could have kept both her and Eleanor.

With kindest remembrance
Yours very sincerely
Eleanor McDougall