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, I _am_ worried,
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--he _will_ do 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, I _know_ Dr. 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.




CHAPTER IX

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 see _her_?" 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 she _is_, 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. "You _do_, 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.

"I _say_! She didn't see my verses, did she? You _won't_ let 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 man_ has 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 to _know_, 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 you _wanted_ to 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! _He_ knows 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; Miss
Quincey 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."




CHAPTER X

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. "_He_ knows 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 her
Juliana, 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 to _Sordello._ 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 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.

"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."

"We must put younger women in her place."

Rhoda winced as though Miss Cursiter had struck her.

"They will soon grow old. Our profession is a cruel one. It uses up the
finest and most perishable parts of a woman's nature. It takes the best
years of her life--and throws the rest away."

"Yet thousands of women are willing to take it up, and leave comfortable
homes to do it too."

"Yes," sighed Rhoda, "it's the rush for the open door."

"My dear Rhoda, the women's labour market is the same as every other. The
best policy is the policy of the open door. Don't you see that the remedy
is to open it wider--wider!"

"And when we've opened all the doors as wide as ever they'll go, what
then? Where are we going to?"

"I can't tell you." Miss Cursiter looked keenly at her. "Do you mean that
you'll go no further unless you know?"

Rhoda was silent.

"There are faults in the system. I can see that as well as you, perhaps
better. I am growing old too, Rhoda. But you are youth itself. It is
women like you we want--to save us. Are you going to turn your back on
us?"

Miss Cursiter bore down on her with her steady gaze, a gaze that was a
menace and an appeal, and Rhoda gave a little gasp as if for breath.

"I can't go any farther."

"Do you realize what this means? You are not a deserter from the ranks.
It is the second in command going over to the enemy."

The words were cold, but there was a fiery court-martial in Miss
Cursiter's eyes that accused and condemned her. If Rhoda had been dashing
her head against the barrack walls her deliverance was at hand. It seemed
that she could never strike a blow for Miss Quincey without winning the
battle for herself.

"I can't help it," said she. "I hate it--I hate the system."

"The system? Suppose you do away with it--do away with every woman's
college in the kingdom--have you anything to put in its place?"

"No. I have nothing to put in its place."

"Ah," said Miss Cursiter, "you are older than I thought."

Rhoda smiled. By this time, wrong or right, she was perfectly reckless.
If everybody was right in rejecting Miss Quincey, there was rapture in
being wildly and wilfully in the wrong. She had flung up the game.

Miss Cursiter saw it. "I was right," said she. "You are under an
influence, and a dangerous one."

"Perhaps--but, influence for influence" (here Rhoda returned Miss
Cursiter's gaze intrepidly), "I'm not far wrong. I honestly think that if
we persist in turning out these intellectual monstrosities we shall hand
over worse incompetents than Miss Quincey to the next generation."

Rhoda was intrepid; all the same she reddened as she realized what a
mouthpiece she had become for Bastian Cautley's theories and temper.

"My dear Rhoda, you're an intellectual monstrosity yourself."

"I know. And in another twenty years' time they'll want to get rid of
_me_."

"Of me too," thought the Head. Miss Cursiter felt curiously old and worn.
She had invoked Rhoda's youth and it had risen up against her. Influence
for influence, her power was dead.

Rhoda had talked at length in the hope of postponing judgment in Miss
Quincey's case; now she was anxious to get back to Miss Quincey, to
escape judgment in her own.

"And how about Miss Quincey?" she asked.

Miss Cursiter had nothing to say about Miss Quincey. She had done with
that section of her subject. She understood that Rhoda had said in
effect, "If Miss Quincey goes, I go too." Nevertheless her mind was made
up; in tissue paper, all ready for Miss Quincey.

Unfortunately tissue paper is more or less transparent, and Miss Quincey
had no difficulty in perceiving the grounds of her dismissal when
presented to her in this neat way. Not even when Miss Cursiter said to
her, at the close of the interview they had early the next morning,
"For your own sake, dear Miss Quincey, I feel we must forego your
valuable--most valuable services."

Miss Cursiter hesitated, warned by something in the aspect of the tiny
woman who had been a thorn in her side so long. Somehow, for this
occasion, the most incompetent, most insignificant member of her staff
had contrived to clothe herself with a certain nobility. She was
undeniably the more dignified of the two.

The Head, usually so eloquent at great moments, found actual difficulty
in getting to the end of her next sentence.

"What I was thinking of--really again entirely for your own sake--was
whether it would not be better for you to take a little longer holiday. I
do feel in your case the imperative necessity for rest. Indeed if you
found that you _wished_ to retire at the end of the holidays--of course
receiving your salary for the term--"

Try as she would to speak as though she were conferring a benefit, the
Head had the unmistakable air of asking a favour from her subordinate, of
imploring her help in a delicate situation, of putting it to her honour.

Miss Quincey's honour was more than equal to the demand made on it. She
had sunk so low in her own eyes lately that she was glad to gain some
little foothold for her poor pride. She faced Miss Cursiter bravely with
her innocent dim eyes as she answered: "I am ready to go, Miss Cursiter,
whenever it is most convenient to you; but I cannot think of taking
payment for work I have not done."

"My dear Miss Quincey, the rule is always a term's notice--or if--if any
other arrangement is agreed upon, a term's salary. There can be no
question--you must really allow me--"

There Miss Cursiter's address failed her and her voice faltered. She had
extracted the thorn; but it had worked its way deeper than she knew, and
the operation was a painful one. A few compliments on the part of the
Head, and the hope that St. Sidwell's would not lose sight of Miss
Quincey altogether, and the interview was closed.

It was understood by the end of the morning that Miss Quincey had sent in
her resignation. The news spread from class to class--"Miss Quincey is
going"--and was received by pupils and teachers with cries of
incredulity. After all, Miss Quincey belonged to St. Sidwell's; she was
part and parcel of the place; her blood and bones had been built into its
very walls, and her removal was not to be contemplated without dismay.
Why, what would a procession be like without Miss Quincey to enliven it?

And so, as she went her last round, a score of hands that had never
clasped hers in friendship were stretched out over the desks in a wild
leave-taking; three girls had tears in their eyes; one, more emotional
than the rest, sobbed audibly without shame. The staff were unanimous in
their sympathy and regret. Rhoda withdrew hastily from the painful scene.
Only the Mad Hatter in her corner made no sign. She seemed to take the
news of Miss Quincey's departure with a resigned philosophy.

"Well, little Classical Mistress," said Miss Quincey, "we must say
good-bye. You know I'm going."

The child nodded her small head. "Of course you're going. I might have
known it. I did know it all along. You were booked to go."

"Why, Laura?" Miss Quincey was mystified and a little hurt.

"Because"--a sinister convulsion passed over the ugly little
pariah face--"because"--the Mad Hatter had learnt the force of
under-statement--"because I _like_ you."

At that Miss Quincey broke down. "My dear little girl--I am going because
I am too old to stay."

"Write to me, dear," she said at the last moment; "let me know how you
are getting on."

But she never knew. The Mad Hatter did not write. In fact she never wrote
anything again, not even verses. She was handed over next term to Miss
Quincey's brilliant and efficient successor, who made her work hard, with
the result that the Mad Hatter got ill of a brain fever just before the
Christmas holidays and was never fit for any more work; and never became
Classical Mistress or anything else in the least distinguished. But this
is by the way.

As the College clock struck one, Miss Quincey walked home as usual and
went up into her bedroom without a word. She opened a drawer and took
from it her Post Office Savings Bank book and looked over her account.
There stood to her credit the considerable sum of twenty-seven pounds
four shillings and eight pence. No, not quite that, for the blouse, the
abominable blouse, had been paid for out of her savings and it had cost a
guinea. Twenty-six pounds three shillings and eight pence was all that
she had saved in five-and-twenty years. This, with the term's salary
which Miss Cursiter had insisted on, was enough to keep her going for a
year. And a year is a long time. She came slowly downstairs to the
drawing-room where her aunt was dozing and dreaming in her chair. There
still hung about her figure the indefinable dignity that had awed Miss
Cursiter. If she was afraid of Mrs. Moon she was too proud to show her
fear.

"This morning," she said simply, "I received my dismissal."

The old lady looked up dazed, not with the news but with her dream. Miss
Quincey repeated her statement.

"Do you mean you are not going back to that place there?" she asked
mildly.

"I am never going back."

Still with dignity she waited for the burst of feeling she felt to be
justifiable in the circumstances. None came; neither anger, nor
indignation, nor contempt, not even surprise. In fact the Old Lady was
smiling placidly, as she was wont to smile under the spell of the dream.

Slowly, very slowly, it was dawning upon her that the reproach had been
taken away from the memory of Tollington Moon. Henceforth his niece Miss
Quincey would be a gentlewoman at large. At the same time it struck her
that after all poor Juliana did not look so very old.

"Very well then," said she, "if I were you I should put on that nice silk
blouse in the evenings."




CHAPTER XI

Dr. Cautley Sends in his Bill


"I wonder," Mrs. Moon observed suddenly one morning, "if that man is
going to let his bill run on to the day of judgment?"

The Old Lady had not even distantly alluded to Dr. Cautley for as
many as ten months. After the great day of what she called Juliana's
"resignation" she seemed to have tacitly agreed that since Juliana had
spared her dream she would spare Juliana's. Did she not know, she too,
that the dream is the reality? As Miss Quincey, gentlewoman at large,
Juliana had a perfect right to set up a dream of her own; as to whether
she was able to afford the luxury, Juliana was the best judge. Her
present wonder, then, had no malignant reference; it was simply wrung
from her by inexorable economy. Juliana's supplies were calculated to
last a year; as it was the winter season that they had lately weathered,
she was rather more than three-quarters of the way through her slender
resources, and it behoved them to look out for bills ahead. And Mrs.
Moon had always suspected that young man, not only of a passion for
mare's-nesting, but of deliberately and systematically keeping back
his accounts that he might revel in a larger haul.

The remark, falling with a shock all the greater for a silence of ten
months, had the effect of driving Juliana out of the room. Out of the
room and out of the house, down High Street, where Hunter's shop was
already blossoming in another spring; up Park Street and past the long
wall of St. Sidwell's, till she found herself alone in Primrose Hill
Park.

The young day was so glorious that Miss Quincey had some thoughts of
climbing Primrose Hill and sitting on the top; but after twenty yards or
so of it she abandoned the attempt. For the last few months her heart had
been the seat of certain curious sensations, so remarkably like those she
had experienced in the summer that she took them for the same, and
sternly resolved to suppress their existence by ignoring it. That, she
understood, was the right treatment for hysteria.

But this morning Miss Quincey's heart protested so violently against her
notion of ascending Primrose Hill, threatening indeed to strangle her if
she persisted in it, that Miss Quincey unwillingly gave in and contented
herself with a seat in one of the lower walks of the park. There she
leaned back and looked about her, but with no permanent interest in one
thing more than another.

Presently, as she settled down to quieter breathing, there came to her a
strange sensation, that grew till it became an unusually vivid perception
of the outer world; a perception mingled with a still stranger double
vision, a sense that seemed to be born in the dark of the brain and to
be moving there to a foregone conclusion. And all the time her eyes
were busy, now with a bush of May in crimson blossom, now with the
many-pointed leaves of a sycamore pricked against the blue; now with the
straight rectangular paths that made the park an immense mathematical
diagram. From where she sat her eyes swept the length of the wide walk
that cuts the green from east to west. Far down at the west end was a
seat, and she could see two people, a man and a woman, sitting on it;
they must have been there a quarter of an hour or more; she had noticed
them ever since she came into the park.

They had risen, and her gaze left everything else to follow them; or
rather, it went to meet them, for they had turned and were coming slowly
eastward now. They had stopped; they were facing each other, and her gaze
rested with them, fascinated yet uncertain. And now she could see nothing
else; the park, with the regions beyond it and the sky above it, had
become merely a setting for one man and one woman; the avenue, fresh
strewn with red golden gravel, led up to them and ended there at their
feet; a young poplar trembled in the wind and shook its silver green fans
above them in delicate confusion. The next minute a light went up in that
obscure and prophetic background of her brain; and she saw Rhoda Vivian
and Bastian Cautley coming towards her, greeting her, with their kind
faces shining.

She rose, turned from them, and went slowly home.

It was the last rent in the veil of illusion that Rhoda had spun so well.
Up till then Miss Quincey had seen only half the truth. Now she had seen
the whole, with all that Rhoda had disguised and kept hidden from her;
the truth that kills or cures.

Miss Quincey did not go out again that day, but sat all afternoon silent
in her chair. Towards evening she became talkative and stayed up later
than had been her wont since she recovered her freedom. She seemed to be
trying to make up to her aunt for a want of sociability in the past.

At eleven she got up and stood before the Old Lady in the attitude of a
penitent. Apparently she had been seized with a mysterious impulse of
confession.

"Aunt," she said, "there's something I want to say to you."

She paused, casting about in her mind for the sins she had committed.
They were three in all.

"I am afraid I have been very extravagant"--she was thinking of the
blouse--"and--and very foolish"--she was thinking of Bastian
Cautley--"and very selfish"--she was thinking of her momentary desire to
die.

"Juliana, if you're worrying about that money"--the Old Lady was thinking
of nothing else--"don't. I've plenty for us both. As long as we can keep
together I don't care what I eat, nor what I drink, nor what I put on my
poor back. And if the worst comes to the worst I'll sell the furniture."

It seemed to Miss Quincey that she had never known her aunt in all those
five-and-twenty years; never known her until this minute. For perhaps,
after all, being angry with Juliana was only Mrs. Moon's way of being
sorry for her. But how was Juliana to know that?

"Only," continued the Old Lady, "I won't part with your uncle's picture.
Don't ask me to part with your uncle's picture."

"You won't have to part with anything. I'll--I'll get something to do.
I'm not worrying. There's nothing to worry about."

She stooped down and tenderly kissed the wrinkled forehead.

A vague fear clutched at the Old Lady's heart.