The family took a house at 70 Bruntsfield Place, and the two girls were soon at school. Mrs. M‘Laren says:--
‘Elsie and I used to go daily to the Charlotte Square Institution, which used in those days to be the Edinburgh school for girls. Mr. Oliphant was headmaster. Father never approved of the Scotch custom of children walking long distances to school, and we used to be sent every morning in a cab. The other day, when telling the story of the S.W.H.’s to a large audience of working women in Edinburgh, one woman said to me, “My husband is a prood man the day! He tells everybody how he used to drive Dr. Inglis to school every morning when she was a girl.”’
Of her school life in Edinburgh, Miss Wright gives these memories:--
‘I remember quite distinctly when the girls of 23 Charlotte Square were told that two girls from Tasmania were coming to the school, and a certain feeling of surprise that the said girls were just like ordinary mortals, though the big, earnest brows and the quaint hair parted in the middle and done up in plaits fastened up at the back of the head were certainly not ordinary. Elsie was put in a higher English class than I was in, and though I knew her, I did not know her very well.
‘A friend has a story of a question going round the class, she thinks Clive or Warren Hastings was the subject of the lesson, and the question was what one would do if a calumny were spread about one. “Deny it,” one girl answered. “Fight it,” another. Still the teacher went on asking. “Live it down,” said Elsie. “Right, Miss Inglis.” My friend writes, “The question I cannot remember, it was the bright confident smile with the answer, and Mr. Hossack’s delighted wave to the top of the class that abides in my memory.”
‘I always think a very characteristic story of Elsie is her asking that the school might have permission to play in Charlotte Square gardens. In those days no one thought of providing fresh air exercise for girls except by walks, and tennis was just coming in. Elsie had the courage (to us schoolgirls it seemed the extraordinary courage) to confront the three directors of the school and ask if we might be allowed to play in the gardens of the Square. The three directors together were to us the most formidable and awe-inspiring body, though separately they were amiable and estimable men!