So at least it seemed to Miss Cursiter, the Head. That tall, lean, iron-grey Dignity stood at the cross junction of two corridors, talking to Miss Rhoda Vivian, the new Classical Mistress. And while she talked she watched her girls as a general watches his columns wheeling into action. A dangerous spot that meeting of the corridors. There the procession doubles the corner at a swinging curve, and there, time it as she would, the little arithmetic teacher was doomed to fall foul of the procession. Daily Miss Quincey thought to dodge the line; daily it caught her at the disastrous corner. Then Miss Quincey, desperate under the eye of the Head, would try to rush the thing, with ridiculous results. And Fate or the Order of the day contrived that Miss Cursiter should always be there to witness her confusion. Nothing escaped Miss Cursiter; if her face grew tender for the young girls and the eight-year-olds, at the sight of Miss Quincey it stiffened into tolerance, cynically braced to bear. Miss Cursiter had an eye for magnificence of effect, and the unseemly impact of Miss Quincey was apt to throw the lines into disorder, demoralising the younger units and ruining the spectacle as a whole. To-day it made the new Classical Mistress smile, and somehow that smile annoyed Miss Cursiter. She, Miss Quincey, was a little dry, brown woman, with a soft pinched mouth, and a dejected nose. So small and insignificant was she that she might have crept along for ever unnoticed but for her punctuality in obstruction. As St. Sidwell's prided itself on the brilliance and efficiency of its staff, the wonder was how Miss Quincey came to be there, but there she had been for five-and-twenty years. She seemed to have stiffened into her place. Five-and-twenty years ago she had been arithmetic teacher, vaguely attached to the Second Division, and she was arithmetic teacher still. Miss Quincey 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.