Superseded | Page 5

waistcoat, scarf
and chain-pin, leaned on a broken column symbolical of his fortunes,
and smiled genially on the ruin he had made.
That was how Miss Quincey came to St. Sidwell's. And now she was
five-and-forty; she had always been five-and-forty; that is to say, she
had never been young, for to be young you must be happy. And this
was so far an advantage, that when middle-age came on her she felt no
difference.

CHAPTER III
Inaugural Addresses
It was evening, early in the winter term, and Miss Cursiter was giving
her usual inaugural address to the staff. Their number had increased so
considerably that the little class-room was packed to overflowing. Miss
Cursiter stood in the free space at the end, facing six rows of eager
faces arranged in the form of a horse-shoe. She looked upon them and
smiled; she joyed with the joy of the creator who sees his idea incarnate
before him.
A striking figure, Miss Cursiter. Tall, academic and austere; a keen
eagle head crowned with a mass of iron-grey hair; grey-black eyes
burning under a brow of ashen grey; an intelligence fervent with fire of

the enthusiast, cold with the renunciant's frost. Such was Miss Cursiter.
She was in splendid force to-day, grappling like an athlete with her
enormous theme--"The Educational Advantages of General Culture."
She delivered her address with an utterance rapid but distinct, keeping
one eye on the reporter and the other on Miss Rhoda Vivian, M.A.
She might well look to Rhoda Vivian. If she had needed a foil for her
own commanding personality, she had found it there. But the new
Classical Mistress was something more than Miss Cursiter's
complement. Nature, usually so economical, not to say parsimonious,
seemed to have made her for her own delight, in a fit of reckless
extravagance. She had given her a brilliant and efficient mind in a still
more brilliant and efficient body, clothed her in all the colours of life;
made her a creature of ardent and elemental beauty. Rhoda Vivian had
brown hair with sparkles of gold in it and flakes of red fire; her eyes
were liquid grey, the grey of water; her lips were full, and they pouted a
little proudly; it was the pride of life. And she had other gifts which did
not yet appear at St. Sidwell's. There was something about her still
plastic and unformed; you could not say whether it was the youth of
genius, or only the genius of youth. But at three-and-twenty she had
chosen her path, and gone far on it, and it had been honours all the way.
She went up and down at St. Sidwell's, adored and unadoring, kindling
the fire of a secret worship. In any other place, with any other woman
at the head of it, such a vivid individuality might have proved fatal to
her progress. But Miss Cursiter was too original herself not to perceive
the fine uses of originality. All her hopes for the future were centred in
Rhoda Vivian. She looked below that brilliant surface and saw in her
the ideal leader of young womanhood. Rhoda was a force that could
strike fire from a stone; what she wanted she was certain to get; she
seemed to compel work from the laziest and intelligence from the
dullest by the mere word of her will. What was more, her nature was
too large for vanity; she held her worshippers at arm's length and
consecrated her power of personal seduction to strictly intellectual ends.
At the end of her first term her position was second only to the Head. If
Miss Cursiter was the will and intelligence of St. Sidwell's, Rhoda
Vivian was its subtle poetry and its soul. And Miss Cursiter meant to
keep her there; being a woman who made all sacrifices and demanded

them.
So now, while Miss Cursiter stood explaining, ostensibly to the entire
staff, the unique advantages of General Culture, it was to Rhoda Vivian
as to a supreme audience that she addressed her deeper thought and her
finer phrase. If Miss Cursiter had not had to consult her notes now and
again, she must have seen that Rhoda Vivian's mind was wandering,
that the Classical Mistress was if anything more interested in her
companions than in the noble utterances of the Head. As her grey eyes
swept the tiers of faces, they lingered on that corner where Miss
Quincey seemed perpetually striving to suppress, consume, and utterly
obliterate herself. And each time she smiled, as she had smiled earlier
in the day when first she saw Miss Quincey.
For Miss Quincey was there, far back in the ranks of the brilliant and
efficient. Note-book on desk, she followed the quick march of thought
with a fatigued and stumbling brain.