That was how Miss Quincey came to St. Sidwell’s.  And now she was five-and-forty; she had always been five-and-forty; that is to say, she had never been young, for to be young you must be happy.  And this was so far an advantage, that when middle-age came on her she felt no difference.

CHAPTER III

Inaugural Addresses

It was evening, early in the winter term, and Miss Cursiter was giving her usual inaugural address to the staff.  Their number had increased so considerably that the little class-room was packed to overflowing.  Miss Cursiter stood in the free space at the end, facing six rows of eager faces arranged in the form of a horse-shoe.  She looked upon them and smiled; she joyed with the joy of the creator who sees his idea incarnate before him.

A striking figure, Miss Cursiter.  Tall, academic and austere; a keen eagle head crowned with a mass of iron-grey hair; grey-black eyes burning under a brow of ashen grey; an intelligence fervent with fire of the enthusiast, cold with the renunciant’s frost.  Such was Miss Cursiter.  She was in splendid force to-day, grappling like an athlete with her enormous theme—­“The Educational Advantages of General Culture.”  She delivered her address with an utterance rapid but distinct, keeping one eye on the reporter and the other on Miss Rhoda Vivian, M.A.

She might well look to Rhoda Vivian.  If she had needed a foil for her own commanding personality, she had found it there.  But the new Classical Mistress was something more than Miss Cursiter’s complement.  Nature, usually so economical, not to say parsimonious, seemed to have made her for her own delight, in a fit of reckless extravagance.  She had given her a brilliant and efficient mind in a still more brilliant and efficient body, clothed her in all the colours of life; made her a creature of ardent and elemental beauty.  Rhoda Vivian had brown hair with sparkles of gold in it and flakes of red fire; her eyes were liquid grey, the grey of water; her lips were full, and they pouted a little proudly; it was the pride of life.  And she had other gifts which did not yet appear at St. Sidwell’s.  There was something about her still plastic and unformed; you could not say whether it was the youth of genius, or only the genius of youth.  But at three-and-twenty she had chosen her path, and gone far on it, and it had been honours all the way.  She went up and down at St. Sidwell’s, adored and unadoring, kindling the fire of a secret worship.  In any other place, with any other woman at the head of it, such a vivid individuality might have proved fatal to her progress.  But Miss Cursiter was too original herself not to perceive the fine uses of originality.  All her hopes for the future were centred in Rhoda Vivian.  She looked below that brilliant surface and saw in her the ideal leader of young womanhood.  Rhoda was a force that could strike fire from a stone;