She stayed on and taught arithmetic for one thing. And when she was not
teaching arithmetic, she was giving little dictations, setting little
themes, controlling some fifty young and very free translators of _Le
Philosophe sous les Toils_. Miss Quincey had a passion for figures and
for everything that could be expressed in figures. Not a pure passion,
nothing to do with the higher mathematics, which is the love of the soul,
but an affection sadly alloyed with baser matter, with rods and perches,
firkins and hogsheads, and articles out of the grocer's shop.

Among these objects Miss Quincey's imagination ran voluptuous riot. But
upon such things as history or poetry she had a somewhat blighting
influence. The flowers in the school Anthology withered under her
fingers, and the flesh and blood of heroes crumbled into the dust of
dates. As for the philosopher under the roofs, who he was, and what was
his philosophy, and how he ever came to be under the roofs at all, nobody
in St. Sidwell's ever knew or ever cared to know; Miss Quincey had made
him eternally uninteresting. Yet Miss Quincey's strength was in her
limitations. It was the strength of unreasoning but undying conviction.
Nothing could shake her belief in the supreme importance of arithmetic
and the majesty of its elementary rules. Pale and persistent and
intolerably meek, she hammered hard facts into the brain with a sort of
muffled stroke, hammered till the hardest stuck by reason of their
hardness, for she was a teacher of the old school. Thus in her own way
she made her mark. Among the other cyphers, the irrelevant and
insignificant figure of Miss Quincey was indelibly engraved on many an
immortal soul. There was a curious persistency about Miss Quincey.

Miss Quincey was not exactly popular. The younger teachers pronounced her
cut and dried; for dryness, conscientiously acquired, passed for her
natural condition. Nobody knew that it cost her much effort and industry