CHAPTER I

Prologue.—­Miss Quincey Stops the Way

“Stand back, Miss Quincey, if you please.”

The school was filing out along the main corridor of St. Sidwell’s.  It came with a tramp and a rustle and a hiss and a tramp, urged to a trot by the excited teachers.  The First Division first, half-woman, carrying itself smoothly, with a swish of its long skirts, with a blush, a dreamy intellectual smile, or a steadfast impenetrable air, as it happened to be more or less conscious of the presence of the Head.  Then the Second Division, light-hearted, irrepressible, making a noise with its feet, loose hair flapping, pig-tails flopping to the beat of its march.  Then the straggling, diminishing lines of the Third, a froth of white pinafores, a confusion of legs, black or tan, staggering, shifting, shuffling in a frantic effort to keep time.

On it came in a waving stream; a stream that flickered with innumerable eyes, a stream that rippled with the wind of its own flowing, that flushed and paled and brightened as some flower-face was tossed upwards, or some crest, flame-coloured or golden, flung back the light.  A stream that was one in its rhythm and in the sex that was its soul, obscurely or luminously feminine; it might have been a single living thing that throbbed and undulated, as girl after girl gave out the radiance and pulsation of her youth.  The effect was overpowering; your senses judged St. Sidwell’s by these brilliant types that gave life and colour to the stream.  The rest were nowhere.

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.