he 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 She worked with the desperate zeal of the superseded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.

"Stand back, Miss Quincey, if you please."

And Miss Quincey stood back, flattening herself against the wall, and the
procession passed her by, rosy, resonant, exulting, a triumph of life.

CHAPTER II

Household Gods

Punctually at four-thirty Miss Quincey vanished from the light of St.
Sidwell's, Regent's Park, into the obscurity of Camden Town. Camden Town
is full of little houses standing back in side streets, houses with
porticoed front doors monstrously disproportioned to their size. Nobody
ever knocks at those front doors; nobody ever passes down those side
streets if they can possibly help it. The houses are all exactly alike;
they melt and merge into each other in dingy perspective, each with its
slag-bordered six foot of garden uttering a faint suburban protest
against the advances of the pavement. Miss Quincey lived in half of one
of them (number ninety, Camden Street North) wit