"Turn round!"
Miss Quincey turned round.
"Much too young for you! Why, bless me, if it doesn't throw up every bit of yellow in your face! If you don't believe me, look in the glass."
Miss Quincey looked in the glass.
Itdidthrow up the yellow tints. It threw everything up to her. If she had owned to a little fear of it before, it affected her now with positive terror. The thing was young, much too young; and it was brutal and violent in its youth. It was possessed by a perfect demon of juvenility; it clashed and fought with every object in the room; it made them all look old, ever so old, and shabby. And as Miss Quincey stood with it before the looking glass, it flared up and told her to her face that she was forty-five—forty-five, and looked fifty.
"Louisa," murmured the Old Lady, "was the only one of our family who could stand pink."
"I will give it to Louisa," cried Miss Quincey with a touch of passion.
"Tchee—tchee!" At that idea the Old Lady chuckled in supreme derision. "Capers and nonsense! Louisa indeed! Much good it'll do Louisa when you've been and nipped all the shape out of it to suit yourself. However you came to be so skimpy and flat-chested is a mystery to me. All the Quinceys were tall, your uncle Tollington was tall, your father, he was tall; and your sister, well; I will say this for Louisa, she's as tall as any of 'em, and she has abust."
"Yes, I daresay it would have been very becoming to Louisa," said MissQuincey humbly. "I—I thought it was lavender."
"Lavender or no lavender, I'm surprised at you—throwing money away on a thing like that."
"I can afford it," said Miss Quincey with the pathetic dignity of the turning worm.
Now it was not worm-like subtlety that suggested that reply. It was positive inspiration. By those simple words Juliana had done something to remove the slur she was always casting on a certain character. Tollington Moon had not managed his nieces' affairs so badly after all if one of them could afford herself extravagances of that sort. The blouse therefore might be taken as a sign and symbol of his innermost integrity. So Mrs. Moon was content with but one more parting shot.
"I don't say you can't afford the money, I say you can't afford the colour—not at your time of life."
Two tears that had gathered in Miss Quincey's eyes now fell on the silk, deepening the mauve-pink to a hideous magenta.
"I was deceived in the colour," she said as she turned from her tormentor.
She toiled upstairs to the back bedroom and took it off. She could never wear it. It was waste—sheer waste; for no other woman could wear it either; certainly not Louisa; she had made it useless for Louisa by paring it down to her own ridiculous dimensions. Louisa was and always had been a head and shoulders taller than she was; and she had a bust.
So Miss Quincey came down meek and meagre in the old dress that she served her for so many seasons, and she looked for peace. But that terrible old lady had not done with her yet, and the worst was still to come.
No longer having any grievance against the blouse, Mrs. Moon was concentrating her attention on that more mysterious witness to Juliana's foolishness—the Cake.
"And now," said she, pointing as she might have pointed to a monument, "will you kindly tell me the meaning of this?"
"I expect—perhaps—it is very likely—that Dr. Cautley will come in to tea this afternoon."
The Old Lady peered at Miss Quincey and her eyes were sharp as needles, needles that carried the thread of her thought pretty plainly too, but it was too fine a thread for Miss Quincey to see. Besides she was looking at the cake and almost regretting that she had bought it, lest he should think that it was eating too many of such things that had made her ill.
"And what put that notion into your head, I should like to know?"
"He has written to say so."
"Juliana—you don't mean to tell me that he invited himself?"
"Well, no. That is—it was an answer to my invitation."
"Yourinvitation? You were not content to have that man poking his nose in here at all hours of the day and night, but you must go out of your way to send him invitations?"
"Dr. Cautley has been most kind and attentive, and—I thought—it was time we paid him some little attention."
"Attention indeed! I should be very sorry to let any young man suppose that I paid any attention to him. I should have thought you'd have had a little more maidenly reserve. Besides, you know perfectly well that I don't enjoy my tea unless we have it by ourselves."
Oh yes, she knew; they had been having it that way for five-and-twenty years.
"As for that cake," continued the Old Lady, "it's ridiculous. Look at it. Why, you might just as well have ordered wedding cake at once. I tell you what it is, Juliana, you're getting quite flighty."
Flighty? No mind but a feminine one, grown up and trained under the shadow of St. Sidwell's, could conceive the nature of Miss Quincey's feelings on being told that she was flighty. She herself made no attempt to express them. She sat down and gasped, clutching her Browning to give herself a sense of moral support. All the rest was intelligible, she had understood and accepted it; but to be told that she, a teacher in St. Sidwell's, was flighty—the charge was simply confusing to the intellect, and it left her dumb.
Flighty? When Martha came in with the tea-tray and she had to order a knife for the cake and an extra cup for Dr. Cautley, she saw Mrs. Moon looking at Martha, and Martha looking at Mrs. Moon, and they seemed to be saying to each other, "How flighty Miss Juliana is getting."
Flighty? The idea afflicted her to such a degree that when Dr. Cautley came she had not a word to say to him.
For a whole week she had looked forward to this tea-drinking with tremors of joyous expectancy and palpitations of alarm. It was to have been one of those rare and solitary occasions that can only come once in a blue moon. The lump sum of pleasure that other people get spread for them more or less thickly over the surface of the years, she meant to take once for all, packed and pressed into one rapturous hour, one Saturday afternoon from four-thirty to five-thirty, the memory of it to be stored up and economised so as to last her life-time, thus justifying the original expense. She knew that success was doubtful, because of the uncertainty of things in general and of the Old Lady's temper in particular. And then she had to stake everything on his coming; and the chances, allowing for the inevitable claims on a doctor's time, were a thousand to one against it. She had nothing to go upon but the delicate incalculable balance of events. And now, when the blue moon had risen, the impossible thing happened, and the man had come, he might just as well, in fact a great deal better, have stayed away. The whole thing was a waste and failure from beginning to end. The tea was a waste and a failure, for Martha would bring it in a quarter of an hour too soon; the cake was a waste and a failure, for nobody ate any of it; and she was a waste and a failure—she hardly knew why. She cut her cake with trembling fingers and offered it, blushing as the gash in its side revealed the thoroughly unwholesome nature of its interior. She felt ashamed of its sugary artifice, its treacherously festive air, and its embarrassing affinity to bride's-cake. No wonder that he had no appetite for cake, and that Miss Quincey had no appetite for conversation. He tried to tempt her with bits of Browning, but she refused them all. She had lost her interest in Browning.
He thought, "She is too tired to talk," and left half an hour sooner than he had intended.
She thought, "He is offended. Or else—he thinks me flighty."
And that was all.
Under a Blue Moon
It was early on another Saturday evening, a fortnight after that disastrous one, and Miss Quincey was taking the air in Primrose Hill Park. She was walking to keep herself warm, for the breeze was brisk and cool. There was a little stir and flutter in the trees and a little stir and flutter in her heart, for she had caught sight of Dr. Cautley in the distance. He was coming round the corner of one of the intersecting walks, coming at a frantic pace, with the tails of his frock-coat waving in the wind.
He pulled himself up as he neared her and held out a friendly hand.
"That's right, Miss Quincey. I'm delighted to see you out. You really are getting strong again, aren't you?"
"Yes, thank you—very well, very strong."
Was it her fancy, or did his manner imply that he wanted to sink that humiliating episode of the tea-party and begin again where they had left off? It might be so; his courtesy was so infinitely subtle. He had actually turned and was walking her way now.
"And how isSordello?" he asked, the tone of his inquiry suggesting that there was something seriously the matter withSordello.
"Getting on. Only fifty-six pages more."
"Youareadvancing, Miss Quincey—gaining on him by leaps and bounds.You're not overdoing it, I hope?"
"Oh no, I read a little in the evenings—I have to keep up to the standard of the staff. Indeed," she added, turning with a sudden suicidal panic, "I ought to be at home and working now."
"What? On a half-holiday? Itisa half-holiday?"
"For some people—not for me."
His eyes—she could not be mistaken—were taking her in as they had done before.
"And why not for you? Do you know, you're looking horribly tired. Suppose we sit down a bit."
Miss Quincey admitted that it would be very nice.
"Hadn't you better put your cape on—the wind's changing."
She obeyed him.
"That's hardly a thick enough wrap for this weather, is it?"
She assured him it was very warm, very comfortable.
"Do you know what I would like to do with you, Miss Quincey?"
"No."
"I should like to pack you off somewhere—anywhere—for another three months' holiday."
"Another three months! What would my pupils do, and what would MissCursiter say?"
It was part of the illusion that she conceived herself to be indispensable to Miss Cursiter.
"Confound Miss Cursiter!"
Evidently he felt strongly on the subject of Miss Cursiter. He confounded her with such energy that the seat provided for them by the London County Council vibrated under it. He stared sulkily out over the park a moment; he gave his cuffs a hitch as if he were going to fight somebody, and then—he let himself go.
At a blind headlong pace, lashing himself up as he went, falling furiously on civilization, the social order, women's education and women's labour, the system that threw open all doors to them, and let them be squeezed and trampled down together in the crush. He was ready to take the nineteenth century by the throat and strangle it; he squared himself against the universe.
"What," said Miss Quincey, "do you not believe in equal chances for men and women?" She was eager to redeem herself from the charge of flightiness.
"Equal chances? I daresay. But not unequal work. The work must be unequal if the conditions are unequal. It's not the same machine. To turn a woman on to a man's work is like trying to run an express train by clock-work, with a pendulum for a piston, and a hairspring for steam."
Miss Quincey timidly hinted that the question was a large one, that there was another side to it.
"Of course there is; there are fifty sides to it; but there are too many people looking at the other forty-nine for my taste. I loathe a crowd."
Stirred by a faintesprit de corpsMiss Quincey asked him if he did not believe in the open door for women?
He said, "It would be kinder to shut it in their faces."
She threw in a word about the women's labour market—the enormous demand.
He said that only meant that women's labour could be bought cheap and sold dear.
She sighed.
"But women must do something—surely you see the necessity?"
He groaned.
"Oh yes. It's just the necessity that I do see—the damnable necessity. I only protest against the preventable evil. If you must turn women into so many machines, for Heaven's sake treat them like machines. You don't work an engine when it's undergoing structural alterations—because, you know, you can't. Your precious system recognises no differences. It sets up the same absurd standard for every woman, the brilliant genius and the average imbecile. Which is not only morally odious but physiologically fatuous. There must be one of two results—either the average imbeciles are sacrificed by thousands to a dozen or so of brilliant geniuses, or it's the other way about."
"Whichever way it is," said Miss Quincey, with her back, so to speak, to the wall, "it's all part of civilization, of our intellectual progress."
"They're not the same thing. And it isn't civilization, it's intellectual savagery. It isn't progress either, it's a blind rush, an inhuman scrimmage—the very worst form of the struggle for existence. It doesn't even mean survival of the intellectually fittest. It develops monstrosities. It defeats its own ends by brutalising the intellect itself. And the worst enemies of women are women. I swear, if I were a woman, I'd rather do without an education than get it at that price. Or I'd educate myself. After all, that's the way of the fittest—the one in a thousand."
"Do you not approve of educated women then?" Miss Quincey was quite shaken by this cataclysmal outbreak, this overturning and shattering of the old beacons and landmarks.
He stared into the distance.
"Oh yes, I approve of them when they are really educated—not when they are like that. You won't get the flower of womanhood out of a forcing-house like St. Sidwell's; though I daresay it produces pumpkins to perfection."
What did he say to Miss Vivian then? Miss Quincey could not think badly of a system that could produce women like Miss Vivian.
A cloud came over his angry eyes as they stared into the distance.
"That's it. It hasn't produced them. They have produced it."
Miss Quincey smiled. Evidently consistency was not to be expected of this young man. He was so young, and so irresponsible and passionate. She admired him for it; and not only for that; she admired him—she could not say exactly why, but she thought it was because he had such a beautiful, bumpy, intellectual forehead. And as she sat beside him and shook to that vibrating passion of his, she felt as if the blue moon had risen again and was shining through the trees of the park; and she was happy, absolutely, indubitably happy and safe; for she felt that he was her friend and her protector and the defender of her cause. It was for her that he raged and maddened and behaved himself altogether so unreasonably.
Now as it happened, Cautley did champion certain theories which Miss Cursiter, when she met them, denounced as physiologist's fads. But it was not they, nor yet Miss Quincey, that accounted for his display of feeling. He was angry because he wanted to come to a certain understanding with the Classical Mistress; to come to it at once; and the system kept him waiting. It was robbing him of Rhoda, and Rhoda of her youth. Meanwhile Rhoda was superbly happy at St. Sidwell's, playing at being Pallas Athene; as for checking her midway in her brilliant career, that was not to be thought of for an instant.
The flower of womanhood—it was the flower of life. He had never seen a woman so invincibly and superlatively alive. Cautley deified life; and in his creed, which was simplicity itself, life and health were one; health the sole source of strength, intelligence and beauty, of all divine and perfect possibilities. At least that was how he began. But three years' practice in London had somewhat strained the faith of the young devotee. He soon found himself in the painful position of a priest who no longer believes in his deity; overheard himself asking whether health was not an unattainable ideal; then declaring that life itself was all a matter of compromise; finally coming to the conclusion that the soul of things was Neurosis.
Beyond that he refused to commit himself to any theory of the universe. He even made himself unpleasant. A clerical patient would approach him with conciliatory breadth, and say: "I envy you, Cautley; I envy your marvellous experience. Your opportunities are greater than mine. And sometimes, do you know, I think you see deeper into the work of the Maker." And Cautley would shrug his shoulders and smile in the good man's face, and say, "The Maker! I can only tell you I'm tired of mending the work of the Maker." Yet the more he doubted the harder he worked; though his world spun round and round, shrieking like a clock running down, and he had persuaded himself that all he could do was to wind up the crazy wheels for another year or so. Which all meant that Cautley was working a little too hard and running down himself. He had begun to specialize in gynecology and it increased his scepticism.
Then suddenly, one evening, when he least looked for it, least wanted it, he saw his divinity incarnate. Rhoda had appealed to him as the supreme expression of Nature's will to live. That was the instantaneous and visible effect of her. Rhoda was the red flower on the tree of life.
At St. Sidwell's, that great forcing-house, they might grow some vegetables to perfection; whether it was orchids or pumpkins he neither knew nor cared; but he defied them to produce anything like that. He was sorry for the vegetables, the orchids and the pumpkins; and he was sorry for Miss Quincey, who was neither a pumpkin nor an orchid, but only a harmless little withered leaf. Not a pleasant leaf, the sort that goes dancing along, all crisp and curly, in the arms of the rollicking wind; but the sort that the same wind kicks into a corner, to lie there till it rots and comes in handy as leaf mould for the forcing-house. Rhoda's friend was not like Rhoda; yet because the leaf may distantly suggest the rose, he liked to sit and talk to her and think about the most beautiful woman in the world. To any other man conversation with Miss Quincey would have been impossible; for Miss Quincey in normal health was uninteresting when she was not absurd. But to Cautley at all times she was simply heart-rending.
For this young man with the irritable nerves and blasphemous temper had after all a divine patience at the service of women, even the foolish and hysterical; because like their Maker he knew whereof they were made. This very minute the queer meta-physical thought had come to him that somehow, in the infinite entanglement of things, such women as Miss Quincey were perpetually being sacrificed to such women as Rhoda Vivian. It struck him that Nature had made up for any little extra outlay in one direction by cruel pinching in another. It was part of her rigid economy. She was not going to have any bills running up against her at the other end of the universe. Nature had indulged in Rhoda Vivian and she was making Miss Quincey pay.
He wondered if that notion had struck Rhoda Vivian too, and if she were trying to make up for it. He had noticed that Miss Quincey had the power (if you could predicate power of such a person), a power denied to him, of drawing out the woman-hood of the most beautiful woman in the world; some infinite tenderness in Rhoda answered to the infinite absurdity in her. He was not sure that her attitude to Miss Quincey was not the most beautiful thing about her. He had begun by thinking about the colour of Rhoda's eyes. He could not for the life of him remember whether they were blue or green, till something (Miss Quincey's eyes perhaps) reminded him that they were grey, pure grey, without a taint of green or a shadow of blue in them. That was what his mind was running on as he looked into the distance and Miss Quincey imagined that his bumpy intellectual forehead was bulging with great thoughts. And now Miss Quincey supplied a convenient pivot for the wild gyrations of his wrath. He got up and with his hands behind his back he seemed to be lashing himself into a fury with his coat-tail.
"The whole thing is one-sided and artificial and absurd. Bad enough for men, but fatal for women. Any system that unfits them for their proper functions—"
"And do we know—have we decided—yet—what they are?" Miss Quincey was anxious to sustain her part in the dialogue with credit.
He stared, not at the distance but at her.
"Why, surely," he said more gently, "to be women first—to be wives and mothers."
She drew her cape a little closer round her and turned from him with half-shut eyes. She seemed at once to be protecting herself against his theory and blinding her sight to her own perishing and thwarted woman-hood.
"All Nature is against it," he said.
"Nature?" she repeated feebly.
"Yes, Nature; and she'll go her own way in spite of all the systems that ever were. Don't you know—-you are a teacher, so you ought to know—that overstrain of the higher faculties is sometimes followed by astonishing demonstrations on the part of Nature?"
Miss Quincey replied that no cases of the kind had come underhernotice.
"Well—your profession ought to go hand-in-hand with mine. If you only saw the half of what we see—But you only see the process; we get the results. By the way I must go and look at some of them."
His words echoed madly in a feverish little brain, "Ought to go—hand-in-hand—hand-in-hand with mine."
"Nature can be very cruel," said she.
Something in her tone recalled him from his flight. He stood looking down at her, thoughtful and pitiful. "And Nature can be very kind; kinder than we are. You are a case in point. Nature is trying to make you well against your will. A little more rest—a little more exercise—a little more air—"
She smiled. Yes, a little more of all the things she wanted and had never had. That was what her smile said in its soft and deprecating bitterness.
He held out his hand, and she too rose, shivering a little in her thin dress.
She was the first to hurry away.
He looked after her small figure, noted her nervous gait and the agitated movement of her hand as the streamers on her poor cape flapped and fluttered, the sport of the unfeeling wind.
A Painful Misunderstanding
And now, on early evenings and Saturday afternoons when the weather was fine, Miss Quincey was to be found in Primrose Hill Park. Not that anybody ever came to look for Miss Quincey. Nevertheless, whether she was walking up and down the paths or sitting on a bench, Miss Quincey had a certain expectant air, as if at any moment Dr. Cautley might come tearing round the corner with his coat-tails flying, or as if she might look up and find him sitting beside her and talking to her. But he did not come. There are some histories that never repeat themselves.
And he had never called since that day—Miss Quincey remembered it well; it was Saturday the thirteenth of March. April and May went by; she had not seen him now for more than two months; and she began to think there must be a reason for it.
At last she saw him; she saw him twice running. Once in the park where they had sat together, and once in the forked road that leads past that part of St. Sidwell's where Miss Cursiter and Miss Vivian lived in state. Each time he was walking very fast as usual, and he looked at her, but he never raised his hat; she spoke, but he passed her without a word. And yet he had recognised her; there could be no possible doubt of it.
Depend upon it there was a reason forthat. Miss Quincey was one of those innocent people who believe that every variety of human behaviour must have a reason (as if only two months ago she had not been favoured with the spectacle of an absolutely unreasonable young man). To be sure it was not easy to find one for conduct so strange and unprecedented, and in any case Miss Quincey's knowledge of masculine motives was but small. Taken by itself it might have passed without any reason, as an oversight, a momentary lapse; but coupled with his complete abandonment of Camden Street North it looked ominous indeed. Not that her faith in Bastian Cautley wavered for an instant. Because Bastian Cautley was what he was, he could never be guilty of spontaneous discourtesy; on the other hand, she had seen that he could be fierce enough on provocation; therefore, she argued, he had some obscure ground of offence against her.
Miss Quincey passed a sleepless night reasoning about the reason, a palpitating never-ending night, without a doze or a dream in it or so much as the winking of an eyelid. She reasoned about it for a week between the classes, and in her spare time (when she had any) in the evening (thus running into debt toSordelloagain). At the end of the week Miss Quincey's mind seemed to have become remarkably lucid; every thought in it ground to excessive subtlety in the mill of her logic. She saw it all clearly. There had been some misunderstanding, some terrible mistake. She had forfeited his friendship through a blunder nameless but irrevocable. Once or twice she wondered if Mrs. Moon could be at the bottom of it—or Martha. Had her aunt carried out her dreadful threat of giving him a hint to send in his account? And had the hint implied that for the future all accounts with him were closed? Had he called on Mrs. Moon and been received with crushing hostility? Or had Martha permitted herself to say that she, Miss Quincey, was out when perhaps he knew for a positive fact that she was in? But she soon dismissed these conjectures as inadequate and fell back on her original hypothesis.
And all the time the Old Lady's eyes, and her voice too, were sharper than ever; from the corner where she dreamed she watched Miss Quincey incessantly between the dreams. At times the Old Lady was shaken with terrible and mysterious mirth. Bastian Cautley began to figure fantastically in her conversation. Her ideas travelled by slow trains of association that started from nowhere but always arrived at Bastian Cautley as a terminus. If Juliana had a headache Mrs. Moon supposed that she wanted that young man to be dancing attendance on her again; if Juliana sighed she declared that Dr. Cautley was a faithless swain who had forsaken Juliana; if Martha brought in the tea-tray she wondered when Dr. Cautley was coming back for another slice of Juliana's wedding-cake. Mrs. Moon referred to a certain abominable piece of confectionery now crumbling away on a shelf in the sideboard, where, with a breach in its side and its sugar turret in ruins, it seemed to nod at Miss Quincey with all sorts of satirical suggestions. And when Louisa sent her accounts of Teenie who lisped in German, Alexander who wrote Latin letters to his father, and Mildred who refused to read the New Testament in anything but Greek, and Miss Quincey remarked that if she had children she wouldn't bring them up so, the Old Lady laughed—"Tchee—Tchee! We all know about old maids' children." Miss Quincey said nothing to that; but she hardened her heart against Louisa's children, and against Louisa's husband and Louisa. She couldn't think how Louisa could have married such a dreadful little man as Andrew Mackinnon, with his unmistakable accent and problematical linen. The gentle creature who had never said a harsh word to anybody in her life became mysteriously cross and captious. She hardened her heart even to little Laura Lazarus.
And one morning when she came upon the Mad Hatter in her corner of the class-room, and found her adding two familiar columns of figures together and adding them all wrong, Miss Quincey was very cross and very captious indeed. The Mad Hatter explained at more length than ever that the figures twisted themselves about; they wouldn't stay still a minute so that she could hold them; they were always going on and on, turning over and over, and growing, growing, till there were millions, billions, trillions of them; oh, they were wonderful things those figures; you could go on watching them for ever if you were sharp enough; you could even—here Laura lowered her voice in awe of her own conception, for Laura was a mystic, a seer, a metaphysician, what you will—you could even think with them, if you knew how; in short you could do anything with them but turn them into sums. And as all this was very confusing to the intellect Miss Quincey became crosser than ever. And while Miss Quincey quivered all over with irritability, the Mad Hatter paid no heed whatever to her instructions, but thrust forward a small yellow face that was all nose and eyes, and gazed at Miss Quincey like one possessed by a spirit of divination.
"Have you got a headache, Miss Quincey?" she inquired on hearing herself addressed for the third time as "Stupid child!"
Miss Quincey relied tartly that no, she had not got a headache. The Mad Hatter appeared to be absorbed in tracing rude verses on her rough notebook with a paralytic pencil.
"I'm sorry; because then you must be unhappy. When people are cross," she continued, "it means one of two things. Either their heads ache or they are unhappy. You must be very unhappy. I know all about it." The paralytic pencil wavered and came to a full stop. "You like somebody, and so somebody has made you unhappy."
But for the shame of it, Miss Quincey could have put her head down on the desk and cried as she had seen the Mad Hatter cry over her sums, and for the same reason; because she could not put two and two together.
And what Mrs. Moon saw, what Martha saw, what the Mad Hatter divined with her feverish, precocious brain, Rhoda Vivian could not fail to see. It was Dr. Cautley's business to look after Miss Quincey in her illness, and it was Rhoda's to keep an eye on her in her recovery, and instantly report the slightest threatening of a break-down. Miss Quincey's somewhat eccentric behaviour filled her with misgivings; and in order to investigate her case at leisure, she chose the first afternoon when Miss Cursiter was not at home to ask the little arithmetic teacher to lunch.
After Rhoda's lunch, soothed with her sympathy and hidden, not to say extinguished, in an enormous chair, Miss Quincey was easily worked into the right mood for confidences; indeed she was in that state of mind when they rush out of their own accord in the utter exhaustion of the will.
"Are you sure you are perfectly well?" so Rhoda began her inquiry.
"Perfectly, perfectly—in myself," said Miss Quincey, "I think, perhaps—that is, sometimes I'm a little afraid that taking so much arsenic may have disagreed with me. You know it is a deadly poison. But I've left it off lately, so I ought to be better—unless perhaps I'm feeling the want of it."
"You are not worrying about St. Sidwell's—about your work?"
"It's not that—not that. But to tell you the truth, Iamworried, Rhoda. For some reason or other, my own fault, no doubt, I have lost a friend. It's a hard thing," said Miss Quincey, "to lose a friend."
"Oh, I am sure—Do you mean Miss Cursiter?"
"No, I do not mean Miss Cursiter."
"Do you mean—me then? Not me?"
"You, dear child? Never. To be plain—this is in confidence, Rhoda—I am speaking of Dr. Cautley."
"Dr. Cautley?"
"Yes. I do not know what I have done, or how I have offended him, but he has not been near me for over two months."
"Perhaps he has been busy—in fact, I know he has."
"He has always been busy. It is not that. It is something—well, I hardly care to speak of it, it has been so very painful. My dear"—Miss Quincey's voice sank to an awful whisper—"he has cut me in the street."
"Oh, I know—hewilldo it; he has done it to all his patients. He is so dreadfully absent-minded."
If Miss Quincey had not been as guileless as the little old maid she was, she would have recognised these indications of intimacy; as it was, she said with superior conviction, "My dear, IknowDr. Cautley. He has never cut me before, and he would not do it now without a reason. There has been some awful mistake. If I only knew what I had done!"
"You've done nothing. I wouldn't worry if I were you."
"I can't help worrying. You don't know, Rhoda. The bitter and terrible part of this friendship is, and always has been, that I am under obligations to Dr. Cautley. I owe everything to him; I cannot tell you what he has done for me, and here I am, not allowed, and I never shall be allowed, to do anything for him." A sob struggled in Miss Quincey's throat.
Rhoda was silent. Did she know? Very dimly, with a mere intellectual perception, but still a great deal better than the little arithmetic teacher could have told her, she understood the desire of that innocent person, not for love, not for happiness, but just for leave to lay down her life for this friend, this deity of hers, to be consumed in sacrifice. And the bitter and terrible thing was that she was not allowed to do it. The friend had no use for the life, the deity no appetite for the sacrifice.
"Don't think about it," she said; it seemed the best thing to say in the singular circumstances. "It will all come right."
By this time Miss Quincey had got the better of the sob in her throat. "It may," she replied with dignity; "but I shall not be the first to make advances."
"Advances? Rather not. But if I thought he was thinking things—he isn't, you know, he's not that sort; still, if I thought it I should have it out with him."
"How could you have it—'out with him'?"
"Oh I should just ask him what he thought of me; or better still, tell him what I thought of him."
Miss Quincey shrank visibly from the bold suggestion.
"Would you? Oh, that would never do. You won't mind my saying so, but I think it would look a little indelicate. Of course it would be very different if it were a woman; if it were you for instance."
"I should do it any way. It's the straightest thing."
"I daresay, dear, in your friendships it is. But I think you can hardly judge of this. You do not know Dr. Cautley as I do."
"No," said Rhoda meekly, "perhaps I don't." Not for worlds would she have destroyed that beautiful illusion.
"It has been," continued Miss Quincey, "a very peculiar, a very interesting relationship. Strange too—considering. If you had asked me six months ago I should have told you that the thing was impossible, or rather, that in nine cases out of ten—I mean I should have said it was highly improbable that Dr. Cautley would take the faintest interest in me, let alone like me."
"He does like you, dear Miss Quincey, I know he does."
"How do you know?"
"He told me so." (Miss Quincey quivered and a faint flush worked up through the sallow of her cheek.) "And I'm sure he would be most distressed to think you were unhappy."
"It is not unhappiness; certainly not unhappiness. On the contrary I have been happy, quite happy lately. And I think it has been bad for me. I wasn't used to it. Perhaps, if it had happened five-and-twenty years ago—Do not misunderstand me, I am merely speaking of friendship, dear; but it might—I mean I might—"
Far back in the chair and favoured by Rhoda's silence, Miss Quincey dropped into a dream. Presently she woke up as it were with a start.
"What am I thinking of? Let us be reasonable; let us reduce it to figures. Forty-five—thirty—he is thirty. Take twenty-five from thirty and five remain. Why, Rhoda, he would have been—"
They looked at each other, but neither said: "He would have been five years old."
Miss Quincey seemed quite prostrated by the result of her calculations.To everything that Rhoda could urge to soothe her she answered steadily:
"You do not know him as I do."
The voice was not Miss Quincey's voice; it was the monotonous, melancholy voice of the Fixed Idea.
Her knowledge of him. After all, nothing could take from her the exquisite privacy of that possession.
* * * * *
"Eros anikate machan," said Rhoda.
Miss Quincey was gone and the Classical Mistress was in school again, coaching a backward student through the "Antigone."
"Oh Love, unconquered in fight. Love who—Love who fliest, who fliest about among things," said the student. And the teacher laughed.
Laughed, for the entertaining blunder called up a vivid image of the god in Miss Quincey's drawing-room, fluttering about among the furniture and doing terrific damage with his wings.
"What's wrong?" asked the student.
"Oh nothing; only a slight confusion between flying about and falling upon. 'Oh Love who fallest on the prey'; please go on."
"'Oh Love who fallest on the prey'—" The chorus mumbled and stumbled, and the student sighed heavily, for the Greek was hard. "He who has—he who has—Oh dear, I can't see any sense in these old choruses; I do hate them."
"Still," said Rhoda sweetly, "you mustn't murder them. 'He who has love has madness.'"
The chorus limped to its end and the student left the coach to some curious reflections.
"Eros anikate machan!"
"Oh Love, unconquered in fight!" It sang in her ears persistently, joyously, ironically—a wedding-song, a battle-song, a song of victory.
Bastian Cautley was right when he said that the race was to the swift and the battle to the strong. How eager she had been for the fight, how mad for the crowded course! She had rushed on, heat after heat, outstripping all competitors and carrying off all the crowns and the judges' compliments at the end of the day. She loved the race for its own sake, this young athlete; and though she took the crowns and the compliments very much as a matter of course, she had come to look on life as nothing but an endless round of Olympic games. And just as she forgot each successive event in the excitement of the next, she also had forgotten the losers and those who were tumbled in the dust. Until she had seen Miss Quincey.
Miss Quincey—so they had let her come to this among them all? They had left her so bare of happiness that the first man (it happened to be her doctor) who spoke two kind words to her became necessary to her existence. No, that was hardly the way to put it; it was underrating Bastian Cautley. He was the sort of man that any woman—But who would have thought it of Miss Quincey? And the really sad thing was that she did not think it of herself; it showed how empty of humanity her life had been. It was odd how these things happened. Miss Quincey was neither brilliant nor efficient, but she had made the most of herself; at least she had lived a life of grinding intellectual toil; the whole woman had seemed absorbed in her miserable arithmetical function. And yet at fifty (she looked fifty) she had contrived to develop that particular form of foolishness which it was Miss Cursiter's business to exterminate. There were some of them who talked as if the thing was done; as if competitive examinations had superseded the primitive rivalry of sex.
Bastian Cautley was right. You may go on building as high as you please, but you will never alter the original ground-plan of human nature. And how she had scoffed at his "man's view"; how indignantly she had repulsed his suggestion that there was a side to the subject that her friends the idealists were much too ideal to see.
Were they really, as Bastian Cautley put it, so engrossed in producing a new type that they had lost sight of the individual? Was the system so far in accordance with Nature that it was careless of the single life? Which was the only life open to most of them, poor things.
And she had blundered more grossly than the system itself. What, after all, had she done for that innocent whom she had made her friend? She had taken everything from her. She had promised to keep her place for her at St. Sidwell's and was monopolising it herself. Worse than that, she had given her a friend with one hand and snatched him from her with the other. (If you came to think of it, it was hard that she who had so much already could have Bastian Cautley too, any day, to play with, or to keep—for her very own. There was not a bit of him that could by any possibility belong to Miss Quincey.) She had tried to stand between her and her Fate, and she had become her Fate. Worse than all, she had kept from her the knowledge of the truth—the truth that might have cured her. Of course she had done that out of consideration for Bastian Cautley.
There it seemed that Rhoda's regard for his feelings ended. Though she admitted ten times over that he was right, she was by no means more disposed to come to an understanding with him on that account. On the contrary, when she saw him the very next evening (poor Bastian had chosen his moment indiscreetly) she endeavoured to repair her blunders by visiting them on his irreproachable head, dealing to him a certain painful, but not wholly unexpected back-hander in the face.
She had done all she could for Miss Quincey. At any rate, she said to herself, she had spared her the final blow.
Through the Stethoscope
One morning the Mad Hatter was madder than ever. It was impossible to hold her attention. The black eyes blazed as they wandered, the paralytic pencil was hot in her burning fingers. When she laid it down towards the end of the morning and rested her head on her hands, Miss Quincey had not the heart to urge her to the loathsome toil. She let her talk.
"Miss Quincey," said the Mad Hatter in a solemn whisper, "I'm going to tell you a secret. Do you seeher?" She indicated Miss Rhoda Vivian with the point of her pencil.
It was evident that Laura Lazarus did not adore the Classical Mistress, and Rhoda, sick of her worshippers, had found this attitude refreshing. Even now she bestowed a smile and a nod on the Mad Hatter that would have kept any other St. Sidwellite in a fortnight's ecstasy.
"Laura, that is not the way to speak of your teachers."
The child raised the Semitic arch of her eye-brows. Her face belonged to the type formed from all eternity for the expression of contempt.
"She's not my teacher, thank goodness. Do you know what I'm going to be some day, when she's married and gone away? I'm going to be what she is—Classical Mistress. I shan't have to do any sums for that, you know. I shall only have to know Greek, and isn't it a shame, Miss Quincey, they won't let me learn it till I'm in the Fourth, and I never shall be. But—don't tell any one—they've stuck me here, behind her now, and when she's coaching that young idiot Susie Parker—"
"Laura, that is not the way to speak of your school-fellows."
"I know it isn't, but sheis, you know. I've bought the books, and I get behind them and I listen hard, and I can read now. What's more, I've done a bit of a chorus. Look—" The pariah took a dirty bit of paper from the breast of her gown. "It goes, 'Oh Love unconquered in battle,' and it's simply splend_if_erous. Miss Quincey—when you like anything very much—or any_body_—it doesn't matter which—do you turn red all over? Do you have creeps all down your back? And do you feel it just here?" The child clapped her yellow claw to Miss Quincey's heart. "Youdo, you do, Miss Quincey; I can see it go thump, I can feel it go thud!"
She gazed into the teacher's face, and again the power of divination was upon her.
"Laura!" Miss Quincey gasped; for the Head had been looming in their neighbourhood, a deadly peril, and now she was sweeping down on them, smiling a dangerous smile.
"Miss Quincey, I hope you've been making that child work," said she and passed on.
"Isay! She didn't see my verses, did she? Youwon'tlet on that I wrote them?"
"You'll never write verses," said Miss Quincey, deftly improving a bad occasion, "if you don't understand arithmetic. Why, it's the science of numbers. Come now, if ninety hogsheads—"
"Oh-h! I'm so tired of hogsheads; mayn't it be firkins this time?"
And, for fancy's sake, firkins Miss Quincey permitted it to be.
Now Rhoda was responsible for much, but for what followed the Mad Hatter must, strictly speaking, be held accountable.
Miss Quincey had never been greatly interested in the movements of her heart; but now that her attention had been drawn to them she admitted that it was beating in a very extraordinary way; there was a decided palpitation, a flutter.
That night she lay awake and listened to it.
It was going diddledy, diddledy, like the triplets in a Beethoven sonata (only that it had no idea of time); then it suddenly left off till she put her hand over it, when it gave a terrifying succession of runaway knocks. Then it pretended that it was going to stop altogether, and Miss Quincey implicitly believed it and prepared to die. Then its tactics changed; it seemed to have shifted its habitation; to be rising and rising, to be entangled with her collar-bone and struggling in her throat. Then it sank suddenly and lay like a lump of lead, dragging her down through the mattress, and through the bedstead, and through the floor, down to the bottom of all things. Miss Quincey did not mind much; she had been so unhappy. And then it gave an alarming double-knock at her ribs, and Miss Quincey came to life again as unhappy as ever.
And of what it all meant Miss Quincey had no more idea than the man in the moon, though even the Mad Hatter could have told her. Her heart went through the same performance a second and a third night, and Miss Quincey said to herself that if it happened again she would have to send for Dr. Cautley. Nothing would have induced her to see him for a mere trifle, but pride was one thing and prudence was another.
It did happen again, and she sent.
She may have hoped that he would discover something wrong, being dimly conscious that her chance lay there, that suffering constituted the incontestable claim on his sympathy; most distinctly she felt the desire (monstrous of course in a woman of no account) to wear the aureole of pain for its own sake; to walk for a little while in the glory and glamour of death. She did not want or mean to give any trouble, to be a source of expense; she had saved a little money for the supreme luxury. But she had hardly entertained the idea for a moment when she dismissed it as selfish. It was her duty to live, for the sake of St. Sidwell's and of Mrs. Moon; and she was only calling Dr. Cautley in to help her to do it. But through it all the feeling uppermost was joy in the certainty that she would see him on an honourable pretext, and would be able to set right that terrible misunderstanding.
She hardly expected him till late in the day; so she was a little startled, when she came in after morning school, to find Mrs. Moon waiting for her at the stairs, quivering with indignation that could have but one cause.
He had lost no time in answering her summons.
The drawing-room door was ajar; the Old Lady closed it mysteriously, and pushed her niece into the bedroom behind.
"Will you tell me the meaning of this?That manhas been cooling his heels in there for the last ten minutes, and he says you sent for him. Is that the case?"
Miss Quincey meekly admitted that it was, and entered upon a vague description of her trouble.
"It's all capers and nonsense," said the Old Lady, "there's nothing the matter with your heart. You're just hysterical, and you just want—?"
"I want toknow, and Dr. Cautley will tell me."
"Oh ho! I daresay he'll find some mare's nest fast enough, if you tell him where to look."
Miss Quincey took off her hat and cape and laid them down with a sigh. She gave a terrified glance at the looking-glass and smoothed her thin hair with her hand.
"Auntie—I must go. I can't keep him waiting any longer."
"Go then—I won't stop you."
She went trembling, followed so closely by Mrs. Moon that she looked like a prisoner conducted to the dock.
"How will he receive me?" she wondered.
He received her coldly and curtly. There was a hurry and abstraction in his manner utterly unlike his former leisurely sympathy. Many causes contributed to this effect; he was still all bruised and bleeding from the blow dealt to him by Rhoda's strong young arm; an epidemic had kept him on his legs all day and a great part of the night; his time had never been so valuable, and he had been obliged to waste ten minutes of it contemplating the furniture in that detestable drawing-room. He was worried and overworked, and Miss Quincey thought he was still offended; his very appearance made her argue the worst. No hope to-day of clearing up that terrible misunderstanding.
She tremulously obeyed his first brief order, one by one undoing the buttons of her dress, laying bare her poor chest, all flat and formless as a child's. A momentary gentleness came over him as he adjusted the tubes of his stethoscope and began the sounding, backwards and forwards from heart to lungs, and from lungs to heart again; while the Old Lady looked on as merry as Destiny, and nodded her head and smiled, as much to say, "Tchee-tchee, what a farce it is!"
He put up the stethoscope with a click.
"There is nothing the matter with you."
Mrs. Moon gave out a subdued ironical chuckle.
Miss Quincey looked anxiously into his face. "Do you not think the heart—the heart is a little—?"
He smiled and at the same time he sighed. "Heart's all right. But you've left off your tonic."
She had, she was afraid that so much poison—
"Poison?" (He was not in the least offended.) "Do you mean the arsenic? There are some poisons you can't live without; but you must take them in moderation."
"Will you—will you want to see me again?"
"It will not be necessary."
At that Mrs. Moon's chuckle broke all bounds and burst into a triumphant "Tchee-tchee-chee!" He went away under cover of it. It was her way of putting a pleasant face on the matter.
She hardly waited till his back was turned before she delivered herself of that which was working within her.
"I tell you what it is, Juliana; you're a silly woman."
Miss Quincey looked up with a faint premonitory fear. Her fingers began nervously buttoning and unbuttoning her dress bodice; while half-dressed and shivering she waited the attack.
"And a pretty exhibition you've made of yourself this day. Anybody might have thought youwantedto let that young man see what was the matter with you."
"So I did. He says there is nothing the matter with me."
"Nothing the matter with you, indeed!Heknows well enough what's the matter with you."
The victim was staring now, with terror in her tired eyes. Her mouth dropped open with the question her tongue refused to utter.
"If you," continued Mrs. Moon, "had wanted to tell him plainly that you were in love with him, you couldn't have set about it better. I should have thought you'd have been ashamed to look him in the face—at your age. You're a disgrace to my family!"
The poor fingers ceased their labour of buttoning and unbuttoning; MissQuincey sat with her shoulders naked as it were to the lash.
"There!" said Mrs. Moon with an air of drawing back the whip and putting it by for the present. "If I were you I'd cover myself up, and not sit there catching cold with my dress-body off."
Miss Quincey Stands Back
As it happened on a Saturday morning she had plenty of time to think about it. All the afternoon and the evening and the night lay before her; she was powerless to cope with Sunday and the night beyond that.
The remarkable revelation made to her by Mrs. Moon was so great a shock that her mind refused to realize it all at once. It was an outrage to all the meek reticences and chastities of her spirit. But she owned its truth; she saw it now, the thing they all had seen, that she only could not see.
She had sinned the sin of sins, the sin of youth in middle-age.
Now it was not imagination in Miss Quincey, so much as the tradition of St. Sidwell's, that gave her innocent affection the proportions of a crime. Miss Quincey had lived all her life in ignorance of her own nature, having spent the best part of five-and-forty years in acquiring other knowledge. She had nothing to go upon, for she had never been young; or rather she had treated her youth unkindly, she had fed it on saw-dust and given it nothing but arithmetic books to play with, so that its experiences were of no earthly use to her.
And now, if they had only let her alone, she might have been none the wiser; her folly might have put on many quaint disguises, friendship, literary sympathy, intellectual esteem—there were a thousand delicate subterfuges and innocent hypocrisies, and under any one of them it might have crept about unchallenged in the shadows and blind alleys of thought. As love pure and simple, if it came to that, there was no harm in it. Many an old maid, older than she, has just such a secret folded up and put away all sweet and pure; the poor lady does not call it love, but remembrance, which is so to speak love laid in lavender; and she—who knows? She might have contrived a little shrine for it somewhere; she had always understood that love was a holy thing.
Unfortunately, when a holy thing has been pulled about and dragged in the mud, it may be as holy as ever but it will never look the same. In Miss Quincey's case mortal passion had been shaken out of its sleep and forced to look at itself before it had time to put on a shred of immortality. In the sudden glare it stood out monstrous, naked and ashamed; she herself had helped to deprive it of all the delicacies and amenities that made it tolerable to thought. With her own hands she had delivered it up to the stethoscope.
He knew, he knew. In the mad rush of her ideas one sentence detached itself from the torrent. "Heknows well enough what's the matter with you."
The nature of the crime was such that there was no possibility or explanation or defence against the accuser whose condemnation weighed heaviest on her soul. He loomed before her, hovered over her, with the tubes of the heart-probing stethoscope in his ears (as a matter of fact they gave him a somewhat grotesque appearance, remotely suggestive of a Hindoo idol; but Miss Quincey had not noticed that); his bumpy forehead was terrible with intelligence; his eyes were cold and comprehensive; the smile of a foregone conclusion flickered on his lips.
He must have known it all the time. There never had been any misunderstanding. That was the clue to his conduct; that was the reason why he had left off coming to the house; for he was the soul of delicacy and honour. And yet she had never said a word that might be interpreted—He must have seen it in her face, then,—that day—when she allowed herself to sit with him in the park. She remembered—things that he had said to her—did they mean that he had seen? She saw it all as he had seen it. "Delicacy" and "honour" indeed! Disgust and contempt would be more likely feelings.
She lay awake all Saturday night and all Sunday night, until four o'clock on Monday morning; always reviewing the situation, always going over the same patch of ground in the desperate hope of finding some place where her self-respect could rest, and discovering nothing but the traces of her guilty feet. A subtler woman would have flourished lightly over the territory, till she had whisked away every vestige of her trail; another would have seen the humour of the situation and blown the whole thing into the inane with a burst of healthy laughter; but subtlety and humour were not Miss Quincey's strong points. She could do nothing but creep shivering to bed and lie there, face to face with her own enormity.
On Monday morning and on many mornings after she crept out into the street stealthily, like a criminal seeking some shelter where she could hide her head. She acquired a habit—odd enough to the casual onlooker—of slinking cautiously round every turning and rushing every crossing in her abject terror of meeting Bastian Cautley.
There was nobody to tell her that it would not matter if she did meet him; no cheerful woman of the world to smile in her frightened face and say: "My dear Miss Quincey, there is nothing remarkable in this. We all do it, sooner or later. Too late? Not a bit of it; better too late than never, and if it's that Cautley man I'm sure I don't wonder. I'm in love with him myself. Lost your self-respect, have you? Self-respect, indeed, why bless your soul, you are all the nicer for it. As for hiding your head I never heard such rubbish in my life. Nobody is looking at you—certainly not the Cautley man. In fact, to tell you the truth, at this moment he is particularly engaged in looking the other way."
But Miss Quincey did not know that lady. She knew no one but Rhoda and Mrs. Moon; and if Mrs. Moon was too old, Rhoda was too young to take that view; besides, Mrs. Moon was not a woman of the world and no ridiculous delicacy prompted her to look the other way. In any case Juliana's state of mind, advertised as it was by her complexion and many eccentricities of behaviour, could not have escaped her notice.
The Old Lady had reverted to her former humorous attitude, and was trying whether Juliana's state of mind would not yield to skilfully directed banter. In these tactics she was not left unsupported. Louisa had written a long letter about her husband and her children, with a postscript.
"P.S.—I don't half like what you tell me about Juliana and Dr. C—. For goodness' sake don't encourage her in any of that nonsense. Sit on it. Laugh her out of it. I agree with you that it would be better if she cultivated her mind a little more.
"P.P.S.—Andrew has just come in. He says we oughtn't to call herJuliana, but Fooliana."
So laughed Louisa, the married woman.
And Fooliana she was called. The joke was quite unworthy of the Greek Professor's reputation, but for Mrs. Moon's purposes he could hardly have made a better one.
Louisa had put a terrible weapon into the Old Lady's hands. It was many weapons in one. It could be turned on in all its broad robust humour—"Fooliana!" Or refined away into a playful or delicate suggestion, pointed with an uplifted finger—"Fooli!" Or cut down and compressed into its essential meaning—"Fool!"
But whichever missile came handy, the effect was much the same. Juliana's complexion grew redder or grayer, but her state of mind remained unchanged. Sometimes the Old Lady tried a graver method.
"If you would cultivate your mind a little in the evenings you would have no time for all this nonsense."
But Juliana had abandoned the cultivation of her mind. She made no attempt to pay off that small outstanding debt toSordello.There was an end of the intellectual life; for the living wells of literature were tainted; Browning had become a bitter memory and Tennyson a shame.
But if Miss Quincey had no heart for General Culture, she was busier than ever in the discharge of her regular duties. At the end of the midsummer term the pressure on the staff was heavy. Her work had grown with the growth of St. Sidwell's, and the pile of marble and granite copy-books rose higher than ever; it was monumental, and Miss Quincey was glad enough to bury her grief under it for a time. Indeed it looked as if in St. Sidwell's she had found the shelter where she could hide her head; and a very desirable shelter too, as long as Mrs. Moon continued in that lively temper. Gradually she began to realize that of all those five hundred pairs of eyes there was none that had discovered her secret; that not one of those busy brains was occupied with her affairs. It was a relief to lose herself among them all and be of no account again. In the corner behind Rhoda Vivian she and the Mad Hatter seemed to be clinging together more than ever in an ecstasy of isolation.
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 nowI'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.
"There can be no two opinions about Miss Quincey."
"I don't know. Miss Quincey," said Rhoda thoughtfully to her pencil, "is a large subject."
"Yes, if you mean that Miss Quincey is a terrible legacy from the past.The question for me is—how long am I to let her hamper our future?"
"The future? It strikes me that we're not within shouting distance of the future. We talk as if we could see the end, and we're nowhere near it, we're in all the muddle of the middle—that's why we're hampered with Miss Quincey and other interesting relics of the past."
"We are slowly getting rid of them."
At that Rhoda blazed up. She was young, and she was reckless, and she had too many careers open to her to care much about consequences. Miss Cursiter had asked for her opinion and she should have it with a vengeance.
"It's not enough to get rid of them. We ought to provide for them. Who or what do we provide for, if it comes to that? We're always talking about specialisation, and the fact is we haven't specialised enough. Don't we give the same test papers to everybody?"
"I shall be happy to set separate papers for each girl if you'll undertake to correct them."
The more Rhoda fired the more Miss Cursiter remained cold.
"That's just it—we couldn't if we tried. We know nothing about each girl. That's where we shall have to specialise in the future if we're to do any good. We've specialised enough with our teachers and our subjects; chipped and chopped till we can't divide them any more; and we've taken our girls in the lump. We know less about them than they do themselves. As for the teachers—"
"Which by the way brings us back to Miss Quincey."
"Everything brings us back to Miss Quincey. Miss Quincey will be always with us."