individuality might have proved fatal to her progress. But Miss Cursiter
was too original herself not to perceive the fine uses of originality.
All her hopes for the future were centred in Rhoda Vivian. She looked
below that brilliant surface and saw in her the ideal leader of young
womanhood. Rhoda was a force that could strike fire from a stone; what
she wanted she was certain to get; she seemed to compel work from the
laziest and intelligence from the dullest by the mere word of her will.
What was more, her nature was too large for vanity; she held her
worshippers at arm's length and consecrated her power of personal
seduction to strictly intellectual ends. At the end of her first term her
position was second only to the Head. If Miss Cursiter was the will and
intelligence of St. Sidwell's, Rhoda Vivian was its subtle poetry and its
soul. And Miss Cursiter meant to keep her there; being a woman who made
all sacrifices and demanded them.

So now, while Miss Cursiter stood explaining, ostensibly to the entire
staff, the unique advantages of General Culture, it was to Rhoda Vivian
as to a supreme audience that she addressed her deeper thought and her
finer phrase. If Miss Cursiter had not had to consult her notes now and
again, she must have seen that Rhoda Vivian's mind was wandering, that
the Classical Mistress was if anything more interested in her companions
than in the noble utterances of the Head. As her grey eyes swept the
tiers of faces, they lingered on that corner where Miss Quincey seemed
perpetually striving to suppress, consume, and utterly obliterate
herself. And each time she smiled, as she had smiled earlier in the day
when first she saw Miss Quincey.

For Miss Quincey was there, far back in the ranks of the brilliant and
efficient. Note-book on desk, she followed the quick march of thought
with a fatigued and stumbling brain. She was painfully, ludicrously out