Light that was filtered through the high tilted windows, and reflected
from a prevailing background of green tiles and honey-white pine, from
countless rows of shining desks and from hundreds of young faces. Light,
the light of ideas, that streamed from the platform in the great hall
where three times in the year Miss Cursiter gave her address to the
students and teachers of St. Sidwell's.

Now Miss Cursiter was a pioneer at war with the past, a woman of vast
ambitions, a woman with a system and an end; and she chose her
instruments finely, toiling early and late to increase their brilliance
and efficiency. She was new to St. Sidwell's, and would have liked to
make a clean sweep of the old staff and to fill their places with women
like Rhoda Vivian, young and magnificent and strong. As it was, she had
been weeding them out gradually, as opportunity arose; and the new staff,
modern to its finger-tips, was all but complete and perfect now. Only
Miss Quincey remained. St. Sidwell's in the weeding time had not been a
bed of roses for Miss Cursiter, and Miss Quincey, blameless but
incompetent, was a thorn in her side, a thorn that stuck. Impossible to
remove Miss Quincey quickly, she was so very blameless and she worked so
hard.

She worked from nine till one in the morning, from two-thirty till
four-thirty in the afternoon, and from six-thirty in the evening till any
hour in the night. She worked with the desperate zeal of the superseded
who knows that she holds her post on sufferance, the terrified tenacity
of the middle-aged who feels behind her the swift-footed rivalry of
youth. And the more she worked the more she annoyed Miss Cursiter.

So now, above all the tramping and shuffling and hissing, you heard the
self-restrained and slightly metallic utterance of the Head.