She entered the arched doorway of the porch. The whole place seemed to have a threatening expression, imitating the church’s architecture, for the purpose of domineering, like a gesture of vulgar authority. She saw that one pair of feet had paddled across the flagstone floor of the porch. The place was silent, deserted, like an empty prison waiting the return of tramping feet. Ursula went forward to the teachers’ room that burrowed in a gloomy hole. She knocked timidly. “Come in!” called a surprised man’s voice, as from a prison cell. She entered the dark little room that never got any sun. The gas was lighted naked and raw. At the table a thin man in shirt-sleeves was rubbing a paper on a jellytray. He looked up at Ursula with his narrow, sharp face, said “Good morning,” then turned away again, and stripped the paper off the tray, glancing at the violet-coloured writing transferred, before he dropped the curled sheet aside among a heap. Ursula watched him fascinated. In the gaslight and gloom and the narrowness of the room, all seemed unreal. “Isn’t it a nasty morning,” she said. “Yes,” he said, “it’s not much of weather.” But in here it seemed that neither morning nor weather really existed. This place was timeless. He spoke in an occupied voice, like an echo. Ursula did not know what to say. She took off her waterproof. “Am I early?” she asked. The man looked first at a little clock, then at her. His eyes seemed to be sharpened to needle-points of vision. “Twenty-five past,” he said. “You’re the second to come. I’m first this morning.” Ursula sat down gingerly on the edge of a chair, and watched his thin red hands rubbing away on the white surface of the paper, then pausing, pulling up a corner of the sheet, peering, and rubbing away again. There was a great heap of curled white-and-scribbled sheets on the table. “Must you do so many?” asked Ursula. Again the man glanced up sharply. He was about thirty or thirty-three years old, thin, greenish, with a long nose and a sharp face. His eyes were blue, and sharp as points of steel, rather beautiful, the girl thought. “Sixty-three,” he answered. “So many!” she said, gently. Then she remembered. “But they’re not all for your class, are they?” she added. “Why aren’t they?” he replied, a fierceness in his voice. Ursula was rather frightened by his mechanical ignoring of her, and his directness of statement. It was something new to her. She had never been treated like this before, as if she did not count, as if she were addressing a machine. “It is too many,” she said sympathetically. “You’ll get about the same,” he said. That was all she received. She sat rather blank, not knowing how to feel. Still she liked him. He seemed so cross. There was a queer, sharp, keen-edge feeling about him that attracted her and frightened her at the same time. It was so cold, and against his nature. The door opened, and a short, neutral-tinted young woman of about twenty-eight appeared.