Superseded

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ts long skirts, with a blush, a dreamy intellectual smile, or a steadfast impenetrable air, as it happened to be more or less conscious of the presence of the Head. Then the Second Division, light-hearted, irrepressible, making a noise with its fee

est, 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 undula

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 t

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 attached to the Second Division, and she was arithmetic teacher still. Miss Quincey was going on for fifty; she had out-

ry of it rested on her family. And when she married the Greek master and went away Juliana stayed

y 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 t

er 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

ody 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 ge

o 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

viduality 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 exqui

lean 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 Mis

y hour in the night. She worked with the desperate zeal of the superseded who knows that she holds her post on sufferance, the terrified te

and hissing, you heard the self-restrained

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against the wall, and the procession passed her