Now Miss Cursiter was a pioneer at war with the past, a woman of vast ambitions, a woman with a system and an end; and she chose her instruments finely, toiling early and late to increase their brilliance and efficiency.  She was new to St. Sidwell’s, and would have liked to make a clean sweep of the old staff and to fill their places with women like Rhoda Vivian, young and magnificent and strong.  As it was, she had been weeding them out gradually, as opportunity arose; and the new staff, modern to its finger-tips, was all but complete and perfect now.  Only Miss Quincey remained.  St. Sidwell’s in the weeding time had not been a bed of roses for Miss Cursiter, and Miss Quincey, blameless but incompetent, was a thorn in her side, a thorn that stuck.  Impossible to remove Miss Quincey quickly, she was so very blameless and she worked so hard.

She worked from nine till one in the morning, from two-thirty till four-thirty in the afternoon, and from six-thirty in the evening till any hour in the night.  She worked with the desperate zeal of the superseded who knows that she holds her post on sufferance, the terrified tenacity of the middle-aged who feels behind her the swift-footed rivalry of youth.  And the more she worked the more she annoyed Miss Cursiter.

So now, above all the tramping and shuffling and hissing, you heard the self-restrained and slightly metallic utterance of the Head.

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

And Miss Quincey stood back, flattening herself against the wall, and the procession passed her by, rosy, resonant, exulting, a triumph of life.

CHAPTER II

Household Gods

Punctually at four-thirty Miss Quincey vanished from the light of St. Sidwell’s, Regent’s Park, into the obscurity of Camden Town.  Camden Town is full of little houses standing back in side streets, houses with porticoed front doors monstrously disproportioned to their size.  Nobody ever knocks at those front doors; nobody ever passes down those side streets if they can possibly help it.  The houses are all exactly alike; they melt and merge into each other in dingy perspective, each with its slag-bordered six foot of garden uttering a faint suburban protest against the advances of the pavement.  Miss Quincey lived in half of one of them (number ninety, Camden Street North) with her old aunt Mrs. Moon and their old servant Martha.  She had lived there five-and-twenty years, ever since the death of her uncle.

Tollington Moon had been what his family called unfortunate; that is to say, he had mislaid the greater portion of his wife’s money and the whole of Juliana’s and Louisa’s; he, poor fellow, had none of his own to lose.  Uncle Tollington, being the only male representative of the family, had been appointed to drive the family coach.  He was a genial good-natured fellow and he cheerfully agreed, declaring that there