intellectual smile, or a steadfast impenetrable air, as it happened to be
more or less conscious of the presence of the Head. Then the Second
Division, light-hearted, irrepressible, making a noise with its feet,
loose hair flapping, pig-tails flopping to the beat of its march. Then
the straggling, diminishing lines of the Third, a froth of white
pinafores, a confusion of legs, black or tan, staggering, shifting,
shuffling in a frantic effort to keep time.

On it came in a waving stream; a stream that flickered with innumerable
eyes, a stream that rippled with the wind of its own flowing, that
flushed and paled and brightened as some flower-face was tossed upwards,
or some crest, flame-coloured or golden, flung back the light. A stream
that was one in its rhythm and in the sex that was its soul, obscurely or
luminously feminine; it might have been a single living thing that
throbbed and undulated, as girl after girl gave out the radiance and
pulsation of her youth. The effect was overpowering; your senses judged
St. Sidwell's by these brilliant types that gave life and colour to the
stream. The rest were nowhere.

So at least it seemed to Miss Cursiter, the Head. That tall, lean,
iron-grey Dignity stood at the cross junction of two corridors, talking
to Miss Rhoda Vivian, the new Classical Mistress. And while she talked
she watched her girls as a general watches his columns wheeling into
action. A dangerous spot that meeting of the corridors. There the
procession doubles the corner at a swinging curve, and there, time it as
she would, the little arithmetic teacher was doomed to fall foul of the
procession. Daily Miss Quincey thought to dodge the line; daily it caught
her at the disastrous corner. Then Miss Quincey, desperate under the eye
of the Head, would try to rush the thing, with ridiculous results. And
Fate or the Order of the day contrived that Miss Cursiter should always