Miss Allison sat at her desk in the class-room, where she had sat for over twenty years, and gazed dreamily out of the window into the courtyard below, where the girls of the ---- High School were at play. In her hand she held a letter, which had brought the white, rigid look to her face, like that of a soldier who has received his death-wound. Perhaps she ought to have been prepared for the shock; the system of "too old at forty" has long been in working order in girls' schools, possibilities had been freely discussed in the mistresses' room; but, nevertheless, the blow had struck her dumb and senseless. The note was very polite--"owing to changes on the staff her valuable services would be no longer required after the summer vacation"--but Miss Allison had seen enough of the inner workings of High Schools to know that changes on the staff meant that the old and incompetent were to be crushed out to make room for the young and fresh. Miss Allison was not incompetent--her worst enemy could not accuse her of that--but she was getting just a little tired, just a little irritable; above all, her forty-second birthday had come and gone. Teaching is well known to affect the nerves, and in Miss Allison's case nervous exhaustion caused her tongue to run away with her; her sharp speeches to the idlers of her form were reported at home--losing nothing in the telling--and duly retailed by captious parents to the head mistress; the constant complaints were becoming a nuisance. Moreover, a young mistress, who would take interest in the sports and could bowl round-arm, was badly wanted on the staff. Miss Allison belonged to an older generation, when athletics were not a _sine qua non_; she had never been a cricketer, at hockey her pupils easily outran her, and she had lost her nerve for high-diving--altogether, she had lived past her age. The queer part was, it had all taken such a little time; it seemed only yesterday that she had come to the school, the youngest on the staff, and now she was the oldest there, far older than the young girl from Girton who reigned as head. And yet life was not nearly over yet; Miss Allison remembered with dismay that women went on living for fifty, sixty, seventy, and even eighty and ninety years--it might be that half the journey still lay before her. She made a rapid calculation in her brain of her little capital in the savings-bank, which yielded her (after the income-tax had been recovered) an annual sum of £10 13s. 9d. Though too old to teach, she was too young to buy much of an annuity with the capital, and she knew the state of the labour market too well to cherish any illusions as to the possibility of obtaining work. Perhaps she ought to have saved more, but for some years she had her invalid mother mainly dependent upon her, and illness runs away with money; she grudged nothing to the dead, but she remembered almost with shame the amount she had spent in holiday tours.