and pitiless after victory: not till then did she examine the nature thus enslaved, seldom did she find it worth the trouble of the skirmish.... To the few that pleased her fastidious taste she gave of her best, lavishly ... to them she was inspiration incarnate.[30] But her interest even in these favorites “required their physical nearness” and died with their departure from school. Just as Clare has reached the “dangerous age” of thirty-five a new teacher of nineteen enters upon the scene: ... vehement Alwynne—no schoolgirl—yet more youthful and ingenuous than any mistress had right to be, loving with all the discrimination of a fine mind and all the ardour of an affectionate child. Here was no ... fleeting devotion that must end as the schooldays ended. Here was love for Clare at last, a widow’s cruse to last her for all time. Clare ... relaxing all effort, settled herself to enjoy to the full the cushioning sense of security. But even so, Alwynne was “too obviously subject through her own free impulse to entirely satisfy. Clare’s love of power had its morbid moments, when a struggling victim pleased her.”[31] So great is the older woman’s magnetism that Alwynne, wholesome and spirited enough to hold her own at first, does not detect the other’s egotistical cruelty until it is exercised upon a student. This hypersensitive child of thirteen, Louise, whose precocity approaches genius, Clare has forced intellectually beyond her strength and reduced emotionally to half-hysterical subservience. Alwynne’s strong maternal instinct moves her to intervene on Louise’s behalf, and a dangerous triangle develops. When, ill from tension, Louise fails in an important interscholastic competition, Clare turns suddenly hostile and excoriates her, not only for the failure, but for her interpretation of a dramatic role rehearsed in addition to her school-room load. Playing the tragic child Prince Arthur in _King John_ has already driven Louise past the limits of stability, and after this double humiliation at the hands of her idolized persecutor, she leaps to death from an attic window. (This antedated by fifteen years Winsloe’s _Mädchen in Uniform_, of which the denouement and certain other details are so similar that some influence seems beyond question.)