After all, above the turmoil of emotion a little tremulous, attenuated ideal was trying to raise its head.  Her duty.  She dimly discerned a possibility of deliverance, of purification from her sin.  Therefore she clung more desperately than ever to her post.  Seeing that she had served the system for five-and-twenty years, it was hard if she could not get from it a little protection against her own weakness, if she could not claim the intellectual support it professed to give.  It was the first time she had ever put it to the test.  If she could only stay on another year or two—­

And now at the very end of the midsummer term it really looked as if St. Sidwell’s was anxious to keep her.  Everybody was curiously kind; the staff cast friendly glances on her as she sat in her corner; Rhoda was almost passionate in her tenderness.  Even Miss Cursiter seemed softened.  She had left off saying “Stand back, Miss Quincey, if you please”; and Miss Quincey began to wonder what it all meant.

She was soon to know.

One night, the last of the term, the Classical Mistress was closeted with the Head.  Rhoda, elbow-deep in examination papers, had been critically considering seventy variously ingenious renderings of a certain chorus, when the sudden rapping of a pen on the table roused her from her labours.

“You must see for yourself, Rhoda, how we are placed.  We must keep up to a certain standard of efficiency in the staff.  Miss Quincey is getting past her work.”

(Rhoda became instantly absorbed in sharpening a pencil.)

“For the last two terms she has been constantly breaking down; and now I’m very much afraid she is breaking-up.”

The Head remained solemnly unconscious of her own epigram.

“No wonder,” said Rhoda to herself, “first love at fifty is new wine in old bottles; everybody knows what happens to the bottles.”

The flush and the frown on the Classical Mistress’s face might have been accounted for by the sudden snapping of the pencil.

“You see,” continued Miss Cursiter, as if defending herself from some accusation conveyed by the frown, “as it is we have kept her on a long while for her sister’s sake.”

(A murmur from the Classical Mistress.)

“Of course we must put it to her prettily, wrap it up—­in tissue paper.”

(The Classical Mistress is still inarticulate.)

“You are not giving me your opinion.”

“It seems to me I’ve said a great deal more than I’ve any right to say.”

“Oh you.  We know all about that.  I asked for your opinion.”

“And when I gave it you told me I was under an influence.”

“What if I did?  And what if it were so?”

“What indeed?  You would get the benefit of two opinions instead of one.”

Now if Miss Cursiter were thinking of Dr. Cautley there was some point in what Rhoda said; for in the back of her mind the Head had a curious respect for masculine judgment.