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was going on for fifty; she
had out-lived the old Head, and now she was the oldest teacher there,
twice as old as Miss Vivian, the new Classical Mistress, older, far older
than Miss Cursiter. She had found her way into St. Sidwell's, not
because she was brilliant or efficient, but because her younger sister
Louisa already held an important post there.
Louisa was brilliant and efficient enough for anybody, so brilliant and
so efficient that the glory of it rested on her family. And when she
married the Greek master and went away Juliana stayed on as a matter
of course, wearing a second-hand aureole of scholarship and supporting
a tradition.
She stayed on and taught arithmetic for one thing. And when she was
not teaching arithmetic, she was giving little dictations, setting little
themes, controlling some fifty young and very 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 the higher mathematics, which is the love of the soul,
but an affection sadly alloyed with baser matter, with rods and perches,
firkins and hogsheads, and articles out of the grocer's shop.
Among these objects Miss Quincey's imagination ran voluptuous riot.
But upon such things as history or poetry she had a somewhat blighting
influence. The flowers in the school Anthology withered under her
fingers, and the flesh and blood of heroes crumbled into the dust of
dates. As for the philosopher under the roofs, who he was, and what
was his philosophy, and how he ever came to be under 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, she hammered hard facts into the brain
with a sort of muffled stroke, hammered till the hardest stuck by reason

of their hardness, for she was a teacher of the old school. Thus in her
own way she made her mark. Among the other cyphers, the irrelevant
and insignificant figure of Miss Quincey was indelibly engraved on
many an immortal soul. There was a curious persistency about Miss
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