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She was painfully, ludicrously out
of step; yet to judge by the light that shone now and then in her eyes,
by the smile that played about the corners of her weak, tender mouth,
she too had caught the sympathetic rapture, the intellectual thrill. Ready
to drop was Miss Quincey, but she would not have missed that
illuminating hour, not if you had paid her--three times her salary. It was
her one glimpse of the larger life; her one point of contact with the
ideal. Her pencil staggered over her note-book as Miss Cursiter flamed
and lightened in her peroration.
"We have looked at our subject in the light of the ideals by which and
for which we live. Let us now turn to the practical side of the matter, as
it touches our business and our bosoms. Do not say we have no room
for poetry in our crowded days." A score of weary heads looked up;
there was a vague inquiry in all eyes. "You have your evenings--all of
you. Much can be done with evenings; if your training has done
nothing else for you it has taught you the economy of time. You are
tired in the evenings, yes. But the poets, Shakespeare, Tennyson, and
Browning, are the great healers and regenerators of worn-out humanity.
When you are faint and weary with your day's work, the best thing you
can do is to rise and refresh yourselves at the living wells of literature."

Long before the closing sentence Miss Quincey's MS. had become a
sightless blur. But she had managed to jot down in her neat arithmetical
way: "Poets = healers and regenerators."
The address was printed and a copy was given to each member of the
staff. Miss Quincey treasured up hers as a priceless scripture.
Miss Quincey was aware of her shortcomings and had struggled hard to
mend them, toiling pantingly after those younger ones who had attained
the standard of brilliance and efficiency. She joined the Teachers'
Debating Society. Not that she debated. She had once put some
elementary questions in an inaudible voice, and had been requested to
speak a little louder, whereupon she sank into her seat and spoke no
more. But she heard a great deal. About the emancipation of women;
about the women's labour market; about the doors that were now
thrown open to women. She was told that all they wanted was a fair
field and no favour. (The speaker, a rosy-cheeked child of
one-and-twenty, was quite violent in her repudiation of favour.) And
Miss Quincey believed it all, though she understood very little about it.
But it was illumination, a new gospel to her, this doctrine of General
Culture; it was the large easy-fitting formula which she had seemed to
need. With touching simplicity she determined to follow the course
recommended by the Head. Though by the time she had corrected some
seventy manuscripts in marble-backed covers, and prepared her lesson
for the next day, she had nothing but the fag-end of her brain to give to
the healers and regenerators; as for rising, Miss Quincey felt much
more like going to bed, and it was as much as she could do to drag her
poor little body there. Still Miss Quincey was nothing if not heroic;
night after night twelve o'clock would find her painfully trying to draw
water from the wells of literature. She had begun upon Browning; set
herself to read through the whole of Sordello from beginning to end. It
is as easy as a sum in arithmetic if you don't bother your head too much
about the Guelphs and Ghibellines and the metaphors and things, and if
you take it in short fits, say three pages every evening. Never any more,
or you might go to sleep and forget all about it; never any less, or you
would have bad arrears. As there are exactly two hundred and thirteen

pages, she calculated that she would finish it in ten weeks and a day.
There was no place for Miss Quincey and her pile of marble-backed
exercise-books in the dim and dingy first-floor drawing-room (Mrs.
Moon and the bandy-legged cabinet would have had something to say
to that). All this terrific intellectual travail went on in a dimmer and
dingier dining-room beneath it.
Then one night, old Martha, disturbed by sounds that came from Miss
Juliana's bedroom, groped her way fumblingly in and found Miss
Juliana sitting up in her sleep and posing the darkness with a problem.
"If," said Miss Juliana, "three men can finish one hundred and nineteen
hogsheads of Browning in eight weeks, how long will it take seven
women to finish a thousand and forty-five--forty-five--forty-five, if one
woman works twice as hard as eleven men?"
Martha shook her head and went fumbling