On Sunday morning, the Sauron Family's carriage followed King's Road across the Serenzo River and entered the University District on Trier's southern bank.
There were no classes that day, but the streets were far from deserted. Groups of young people gathered in cafés, bookshops, and outside college gates. Some argued about philosophy, their faces flushed; others sat on steps reading newly published poetry collections; still others crowded around noticeboards, offering blunt opinions on the posted announcements.
Compared with other parts of Trier, the crowds here were noticeably younger and livelier.
Yet after observing through the carriage window for a while, Charlotte soon realized that almost all the university students on the streets were men. The occasional women generally traveled by carriage or had maids accompanying them, rarely venturing out alone.
Charlotte, who came from a modern Earth where men and women no longer faced any marked difference in access to education, found this rather unsettling. Yet in the present-day Intis Kingdom, and indeed across almost the entire Northern Continent, women still faced numerous restrictions on their education.
Daughters of ordinary families generally learned only basic reading, writing, and arithmetic from their parents, acquiring enough knowledge for everyday use. Better-off families hired tutors to teach grammar, history, and etiquette-the sort of education Charlotte herself had received. Some devout believers sent their daughters to convents for a few years of schooling before they returned home upon reaching adulthood. Opportunities to actually enter institutions of higher learning were few and far between.
In Trier, the capital of Intis, for example, the largest institution, Trier University, had four faculties, of which only the Faculty of Letters formally admitted female students. Even then, applicants had to be nobles or come from wealthy families with sufficient status and means to support their studies.
Although some other