be there to witness her confusion. Nothing escaped Miss Cursiter; if her
face grew tender for the young girls and the eight-year-olds, at the
sight of Miss Quincey it stiffened into tolerance, cynically braced to
bear. Miss Cursiter had an eye for magnificence of effect, and the
unseemly impact of Miss Quincey was apt to throw the lines into disorder,
demoralising the younger units and ruining the spectacle as a whole.
To-day it made the new Classical Mistress smile, and somehow that smile
annoyed Miss Cursiter.

She, Miss Quincey, was a little dry, brown woman, with a soft pinched
mouth, and a dejected nose. So small and insignificant was she that she
might have crept along for ever unnoticed but for her punctuality in
obstruction. As St. Sidwell's prided itself on the brilliance and
efficiency of its staff, the wonder was how Miss Quincey came to be
there, but there she had been for five-and-twenty years. She seemed to
have stiffened into her place. Five-and-twenty years ago she had been
arithmetic teacher, vaguely attached to the Second Division, and she was
arithmetic teacher still. Miss Quincey was going on for fifty; she had
out-lived the old Head, and now she was the oldest teacher there, twice
as old as Miss Vivian, the new Classical Mistress, older, far older than
Miss Cursiter. She had found her way into St. Sidwell's, not because she
was brilliant or efficient, but because her younger sister Louisa already
held an important post there.

Louisa was brilliant and efficient enough for anybody, so brilliant and
so efficient that the glory of it rested on her family. And when she
married the Greek master and went away Juliana stayed on as a matter of
course, wearing a second-hand aureole of scholarship and supporting a
tradition.