Miss Quincey was not exactly popular.  The younger teachers pronounced her cut and dried; for dryness, conscientiously acquired, passed for her natural condition.  Nobody knew that it cost her much effort and industry to be so stiff and starched; that the starch had to be put on fresh every morning; that it was quite a business getting up her limp little personality for the day.  In five-and-twenty years, owing to an incurable malady of shyness, she had never made friends with any of her pupils.

Her one exception proved her rule.  Miss Quincey seemed to have gone out of her way to attract that odious little Laura Lazarus, who was known at St. Sidwell’s as the Mad Hatter.  At fourteen, being still incapable of adding two and two together, the Mad Hatter had been told off into an idiot’s class by herself for arithmetic; and Miss Quincey, because she was so meek and patient and persistent, was told off to teach her.  The child, a queer, ugly little pariah, half-Jew, half-Cockney, held all other girls in abhorrence, and was avoided by them with an equal loathing.  She seemed to have attached herself to the unpopular teacher out of sheer perversity and malignant contempt of public opinion.  Abandoned in their corner, with their heads bent together over the sums, the two outsiders clung to each other in a common misery and isolation.

Miss Quincey was well aware that she was of no account at St. Sidwell’s.  She supposed that it was because she had never taken her degree.  To be sure she had never tried to take it; but it was by no means certain that she could have taken it if she had tried.  She was not clever; Louisa had carried off all the brains and the honours of the family.  It had been considered unnecessary for Juliana to develop an individuality of her own; enough for her that she belonged to Louisa, and was known as Louisa’s sister.  Louisa’s sister was a part of Louisa; Louisa was a part of St. Sidwell’s College, Regent’s Park; and St. Sidwell’s College, Regent’s Park, was a part—­no, St. Sidwell’s was the whole; it was the glorious world.  Miss Quincey had never seen, or even desired to see any other.  That college was to her a place of exquisite order and light.  Light that was filtered through the high tilted windows, and reflected from a prevailing background of green tiles and honey-white pine, from countless rows of shining desks and from hundreds of young faces.  Light, the light of ideas, that streamed from the platform in the great hall where three times in the year Miss Cursiter gave her address to the students and teachers of St. Sidwell’s.