Superseded | Page 3

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 the 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 She worked with the desperate zeal of the superseded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) with her old
aunt Mrs. Moon and their old servant Martha. She had lived there
five-and-twenty years, ever since the death of her uncle.
Tollington Moon had been what his family called unfortunate; that is to
say, he had mislaid the greater portion of his wife's money and the
whole of Juliana's and Louisa's; he, poor fellow, had none of his own to
lose. Uncle Tollington, being the only male representative of the family,
had been appointed to drive the family coach. He was a genial
good-natured fellow and he cheerfully agreed, declaring that there was
nothing in the world he liked better than driving; though indeed he had
had but little practice in the art. So they started with a splendid
flourishing of whips and blowing of horns; Tollington driving at a
furious break-neck pace in a manner highly diverting and exhilarating
to the ladies inside. The girls (they were girls in those days) sat tight
and felt no fear, while Mrs. Moon, with her teeth shaking, explained to
them the advantages of having so expert a driver on the box seat. Of
course there came the inevitable smash at the corner. The three climbed
out of that coach more dead than alive; but they uttered no complaints;
they had had their fun; and in accidents of this kind the poor driver
generally gets the worst of it.

Mrs. Moon at any rate found consolation in disaster by steadily
ignoring its most humiliating features. Secure in the new majesty of her
widowhood, she faced her nieces with an unflinching air and demanded
of them eternal belief in the wisdom and rectitude of their uncle
Tollington. She hoped that they would never forget him, never forget
what he had to bear, never forget all he had done for them. Her attitude
reduced Juliana to tears; in Louisa it roused the instinct of revolt, and
Louisa was for separating from Mrs. Moon. It was then, in her first
difference from Louisa, that Miss Quincey's tender and foolish little
face acquired its strangely persistent air. Hitherto the elder had served
the