iss 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
to be so stiff and starched; that the starch had to be put on fresh every
morning; that it was quite a business getting up her limp little
personality for the day. In five-and-twenty years, owing to an incurable
malady of shyness, she had never made friends with any of her pupils.

Her one exception proved her rule. Miss Quincey seemed to have gone out
of her way to attract that odious little Laura Lazarus, who was known at
St. Sidwell's as the Mad Hatter. At fourteen, being still incapable of
adding two and two together, the Mad Hatter had been told off into an
idiot's class by herself for arithmetic; and Miss Quincey, because she
was so meek and patient and persistent, was told off to teach her. The
child, a queer, ugly little pariah, half-Jew, half-Cockney, held all
other girls in abhorrence, and was avoided by them with an equal
loathing. She seemed to have attached herself to the unpopular teacher
out of sheer perversity and malignant contempt of public opinion.
Abandoned in their corner, with their heads bent together over the sums,
the two outsiders clung to each other in a common misery and isolation.

Miss Quincey was well aware that she was of no account at St. Sidwell's.
She supposed that it was because she had never taken her degree. To be
sure she had never tried to take it; but it was by no means certain that
she could have taken it if she had tried. She was not clever; Louisa had
carried off all the brains and the honours of the family. It had been
considered unnecessary for Juliana to develop an individuality of her
own; enough for her that she belonged to Louisa, and was known as
Louisa's sister. Louisa's sister was a part of Louisa; Louisa was a part
of St. Sidwell's College, Regent's Park; and St. Sidwell's College,
Regent's Park, was a part--no, St. Sidwell's was the whole; it was the
glorious world. Miss Quincey had never seen, or even desired to see any
other. That college was to her a place of exquisite order and light.
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 t