tream; 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
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 att