SUPERSEDED

                            BY MAY SINCLAIR

                     _Author of "The Divine Fire"_

                                  1906




PUBLISHERS' NOTE


Miss Sinclair has expressed a desire to have this book republished in
America, because she considers it the best of her work previous to "The
Divine Fire." It originally appeared with another work in a volume
entitled "Two Sides of a Question," a small imported edition of which is
now exhausted.




CONTENTS


CHAPTER

     I. PROLOGUE.--MISS QUINCEY STOPS THE WAY
    II. HOUSEHOLD GODS
   III. INAUGURAL ADDRESSES
    IV. BASTIAN CAUTLEY, M.D.
     V. HEALERS AND REGENERATORS
    VI. SPRING FASHIONS
   VII. UNDER A BLUE MOON
  VIII. A PAINFUL MISUNDERSTANDING
    IX. THROUGH THE STETHOSCOPE
     X. MISS QUINCEY STANDS BACK
    XI. DR. CAUTLEY SENDS IN HIS BILL
   XII. EPILOGUE.--THE MAN AND THE WOMAN




SUPERSEDED




CHAPTER I

Prologue.--Miss Quincey Stops the Way


"Stand back, Miss Quincey, if you please."

The school was filing out along the main corridor of St. Sidwell's. It
came with a tramp and a rustle and a hiss and a tramp, urged to a trot by
the excited teachers. The First Division first, half-woman, carrying
itself smoothly, with a swish of its long skirts, with a blush, a dreamy
intellectual smile, or a steadfast impenetrable air, as it happened to be
more or less conscious of the presence of the Head. Then the Second
Division, light-hearted, irrepressible, making a noise with its feet,
loose hair flapping, pig-tails flopping to the beat of its march. Then
the straggling, diminishing lines of the Third, a froth of white
pinafores, a confusion of legs, black or tan, staggering, shifting,
shuffling in a frantic effort to keep time.

On it came in a waving stream; a stream that flickered with innumerable
eyes, a stream that rippled with the wind of its own flowing, that
flushed and paled and brightened as some flower-face was tossed upwards,
or some crest, flame-coloured or golden, flung back the light. A stream
that was one in its rhythm and in the sex that was its soul, obscurely or
luminously feminine; it might have been a single living thing that
throbbed and undulated, as girl after girl gave out the radiance and
pulsation of her youth. The effect was overpowering; your senses judged
St. Sidwell's by these brilliant types that gave life and colour to the
stream. The rest were nowhere.

So at least it seemed to Miss Cursiter, the Head. That tall, lean,
iron-grey Dignity stood at the cross junction of two corridors, talking
to Miss Rhoda Vivian, the new Classical Mistress. And while she talked
she watched her girls as a general watches his columns wheeling into
action. A dangerous spot that meeting of the corridors. There the
procession doubles the corner at a swinging curve, and there, time it as
she would, the little arithmetic teacher was doomed to fall foul of the
procession. Daily Miss Quincey thought to dodge the line; daily it caught
her at the disastrous corner. Then Miss Quincey, desperate under the eye
of the Head, would try to rush the thing, with ridiculous results. And
Fate or the Order of the day contrived that Miss Cursiter should always
be there to witness her confusion. Nothing escaped Miss Cursiter; if her
face grew tender for the young girls and the eight-year-olds, at the
sight of Miss Quincey it stiffened into tolerance, cynically braced to
bear. Miss Cursiter had an eye for magnificence of effect, and the
unseemly impact of Miss Quincey was apt to throw the lines into disorder,
demoralising the younger units and ruining the spectacle as a whole.
To-day it made the new Classical Mistress smile, and somehow that smile
annoyed Miss Cursiter.

She, Miss Quincey, was a little dry, brown woman, with a soft pinched
mouth, and a dejected nose. So small and insignificant was she that she
might have crept along for ever unnoticed but for her punctuality in
obstruction. As St. Sidwell's prided itself on the brilliance and
efficiency of its staff, the wonder was how Miss Quincey came to be
there, but there she had been for five-and-twenty years. She seemed to
have stiffened into her place. Five-and-twenty years ago she had been
arithmetic teacher, vaguely attached to the Second Division, and she was
arithmetic teacher still. Miss Quincey was going on for fifty; she had
out-lived the old Head, and now she was the oldest teacher there, twice
as old as Miss Vivian, the new Classical Mistress, older, far older than
Miss Cursiter. She had found her way into St. Sidwell's, not because she
was brilliant or efficient, but because her younger sister Louisa already
held an important post there.

Louisa was brilliant and efficient enough for anybody, so brilliant and
so efficient that the glory of it rested on her family. And when she
married the Greek master and went away Juliana stayed on as a matter of
course, wearing a second-hand aureole of scholarship and supporting a
tradition.

She stayed on and taught arithmetic for one thing. And when she was not
teaching arithmetic, she was giving little dictations, setting little
themes, controlling some fifty young and very free translators of _Le
Philosophe sous les Toils_. Miss Quincey had a passion for figures and
for everything that could be expressed in figures. Not a pure passion,
nothing to do with the higher mathematics, which is the love of the soul,
but an affection sadly alloyed with baser matter, with rods and perches,
firkins and hogsheads, and articles out of the grocer's shop.

Among these objects Miss Quincey's imagination ran voluptuous riot. But
upon such things as history or poetry she had a somewhat blighting
influence. The flowers in the school Anthology withered under her
fingers, and the flesh and blood of heroes crumbled into the dust of
dates. As for the philosopher under the roofs, who he was, and what was
his philosophy, and how he ever came to be under the roofs at all, nobody
in St. Sidwell's ever knew or ever cared to know; Miss Quincey had made
him eternally uninteresting. Yet Miss Quincey's strength was in her
limitations. It was the strength of unreasoning but undying conviction.
Nothing could shake her belief in the supreme importance of arithmetic
and the majesty of its elementary rules. Pale and persistent and
intolerably meek, she hammered hard facts into the brain with a sort of
muffled stroke, hammered till the hardest stuck by reason of their
hardness, for she was a teacher of the old school. Thus in her own way
she made her mark. Among the other cyphers, the irrelevant and
insignificant figure of Miss Quincey was indelibly engraved on many an
immortal soul. There was a curious persistency about Miss Quincey.

Miss Quincey was not exactly popular. The younger teachers pronounced her
cut and dried; for dryness, conscientiously acquired, passed for her
natural condition. Nobody knew that it cost her much effort and industry
to be so stiff and starched; that the starch had to be put on fresh every
morning; that it was quite a business getting up her limp little
personality for the day. In five-and-twenty years, owing to an incurable
malady of shyness, she had never made friends with any of her pupils.

Her one exception proved her rule. Miss Quincey seemed to have gone out
of her way to attract that odious little Laura Lazarus, who was known at
St. Sidwell's as the Mad Hatter. At fourteen, being still incapable of
adding two and two together, the Mad Hatter had been told off into an
idiot's class by herself for arithmetic; and Miss Quincey, because she
was so meek and patient and persistent, was told off to teach her. The
child, a queer, ugly little pariah, half-Jew, half-Cockney, held all
other girls in abhorrence, and was avoided by them with an equal
loathing. She seemed to have attached herself to the unpopular teacher
out of sheer perversity and malignant contempt of public opinion.
Abandoned in their corner, with their heads bent together over the sums,
the two outsiders clung to each other in a common misery and isolation.

Miss Quincey was well aware that she was of no account at St. Sidwell's.
She supposed that it was because she had never taken her degree. To be
sure she had never tried to take it; but it was by no means certain that
she could have taken it if she had tried. She was not clever; Louisa had
carried off all the brains and the honours of the family. It had been
considered unnecessary for Juliana to develop an individuality of her
own; enough for her that she belonged to Louisa, and was known as
Louisa's sister. Louisa's sister was a part of Louisa; Louisa was a part
of St. Sidwell's College, Regent's Park; and St. Sidwell's College,
Regent's Park, was a part--no, St. Sidwell's was the whole; it was the
glorious world. Miss Quincey had never seen, or even desired to see any
other. That college was to her a place of exquisite order and light.
Light that was filtered through the high tilted windows, and reflected
from a prevailing background of green tiles and honey-white pine, from
countless rows of shining desks and from hundreds of young faces. Light,
the light of ideas, that streamed from the platform in the great hall
where three times in the year Miss Cursiter gave her address to the
students and teachers of St. Sidwell's.

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 was nothing in the
world he liked better than driving; though indeed he had had but little
practice in the art. So they started with a splendid flourishing of whips
and blowing of horns; Tollington driving at a furious break-neck pace in
a manner highly diverting and exhilarating to the ladies inside. The
girls (they were girls in those days) sat tight and felt no fear, while
Mrs. Moon, with her teeth shaking, explained to them the advantages of
having so expert a driver on the box seat. Of course there came the
inevitable smash at the corner. The three climbed out of that coach more
dead than alive; but they uttered no complaints; they had had their fun;
and in accidents of this kind the poor driver generally gets the worst of
it.

Mrs. Moon at any rate found consolation in disaster by steadily ignoring
its most humiliating features. Secure in the new majesty of her
widowhood, she faced her nieces with an unflinching air and demanded of
them eternal belief in the wisdom and rectitude of their uncle
Tollington. She hoped that they would never forget him, never forget what
he had to bear, never forget all he had done for them. Her attitude
reduced Juliana to tears; in Louisa it roused the instinct of revolt, and
Louisa was for separating from Mrs. Moon. It was then, in her first
difference from Louisa, that Miss Quincey's tender and foolish little
face acquired its strangely persistent air. Hitherto the elder had served
the younger; now she took her stand. She said, "Whatever we do, we must
keep together"; and she professed her willingness to believe in her uncle
Tollington and remember him for ever.

To this Louisa, who prided herself on speaking the truth or at any rate
her mind, replied that she wasn't likely to forget him in a hurry; that
her uncle Tollington had ruined her life, and she did not want to be
reminded of him any more than she could help. Moreover, she found her
aunt Moon's society depressing. She meant to get on and be independent;
and she advised Juliana to do the same.

Juliana did not press the point, for it was a delicate one, seeing that
Louisa was earning a hundred and twenty pounds a year and she but eighty.
So she added her eighty pounds to her aunt's eighty and went to live with
her in Camden Street North, while Louisa shrugged her shoulders and
carried herself and her salary elsewhere.

There was very little room for Mrs. Moon and Juliana at number ninety.
The poor souls had crowded themselves out with relics of their past, a
pathetic salvage, dragged hap-hazard from the wreck in the first frenzy
of preservation. Dreadful things in marble and gilt and in _papier-machГ©_
inlaid with mother-o'-pearl, rickety work tables with pouches underneath
them, banner-screens in silk and footstools in Berlin wool-work fought
with each other and with Juliana for standing-room. For Juliana, with her
genius for collision, was always knocking up against them, always getting
in their way. In return, Juliana's place at an oblique angle of the
fireside was disputed by a truculent cabinet with bandy legs. There was a
never-ending quarrel between Juliana and that piece of furniture, in
which Mrs. Moon took the part of the furniture. Her own world had shrunk
to a square yard between the window and the fire. There she sat and
dreamed among her household gods, smiling now and then under the spell of
the dream, or watched her companion with critical disapproval. She had
accepted Juliana's devotion as a proper sacrifice to the gods; but for
Juliana, or Louisa for the matter of that, she seemed to have but little
affection. If anything Louisa was her favourite. Louisa was better
company, to begin with; and Louisa, with her cleverness and her salary
and her general air of indifference and prosperity, raised no questions.
Besides, Louisa was married.

But Juliana, toiling from morning till night for her eighty pounds a
year; Juliana, painful and persistent, growing into middle-age without a
hope, Juliana was an incarnate reproach, a perpetual monument to the
folly of Tollington Moon. Juliana disturbed her dream.

But nobody else disturbed it, for nobody ever came to their half of the
house in Camden Street North. Louisa used to come and go in a brief
perfunctory manner; but Louisa had married the Greek professor and gone
away for good, and her friends at St. Sidwell's were not likely to waste
their time in cultivating Juliana and Mrs. Moon. The thing had been tried
by one or two of the younger teachers who went in for all-round
self-development and were getting up the minor virtues. But they had met
with no encouragement and they had ceased to come. Then nobody came; not
even the doctor or the clergyman. The two ladies were of one mind on that
point; it was convenient for them to ignore their trifling ailments,
spiritual or bodily. And as soon as they saw that the world renounced
them they adopted a lofty tone and said to each other that they had
renounced the world. For they were proud, Mrs. Moon especially so.
Tollington Moon had married slightly, ever so slightly beneath him, the
Moons again marking a faint descent from the standing of the Quinceys.
But the old lady had completely identified herself, not only with the
Moons, but with the higher branch, which she always spoke of as "_my_
family." In fact she had worn her connection with the Quinceys as a
feather in her cap so long that the feather had grown, as it were, into
an entire bird of paradise. And once a bird of paradise, always a bird of
paradise, though it had turned on the world a somewhat dilapidated tail.

So the two lived on together; so they had always lived. Mrs. Moon
was an old woman before she was five-and-fifty; and before she was
five-and-twenty Juliana's youth had withered away in the sour and
sordid atmosphere born of perishing gentility and acrid personal remark.
And their household gods looked down on them, miniatures and silhouettes
of Moons and Quinceys, calm and somewhat contemptuous presences. From the
post of honour above the mantelshelf, Tollington, attired as an Early
Victorian dandy, splendid in velvet waistcoat, scarf and chain-pin,
leaned on a broken column symbolical of his fortunes, and smiled genially
on the ruin he had made.

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




CHAPTER III

Inaugural Addresses


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

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

She might well look to Rhoda Vivian. If she had needed a foil for her own
commanding personality, she had found it there. But the new Classical
Mistress was something more than Miss Cursiter's complement. Nature,
usually so economical, not to say parsimonious, seemed to have made her
for her own delight, in a fit of reckless extravagance. She had given her
a brilliant and efficient mind in a still more brilliant and efficient
body, clothed her in all the colours of life; made her a creature of
ardent and elemental beauty. Rhoda Vivian had brown hair with sparkles of
gold in it and flakes of red fire; her eyes were liquid grey, the grey of
water; her lips were full, and they pouted a little proudly; it was the
pride of life. And she had other gifts which did not yet appear at St.
Sidwell's. There was something about her still plastic and unformed; you
could not say whether it was the youth of genius, or only the genius of
youth. But at three-and-twenty she had chosen her path, and gone far on
it, and it had been honours all the way. She went up and down at St.
Sidwell's, adored and unadoring, kindling the fire of a secret worship.
In any other place, with any other woman at the head of it, such a vivid
individuality might have proved fatal to her progress. But Miss Cursiter
was too original herself not to perceive the fine uses of originality.
All her hopes for the future were centred in Rhoda Vivian. She looked
below that brilliant surface and saw in her the ideal leader of young
womanhood. Rhoda was a force that could strike fire from a stone; what
she wanted she was certain to get; she seemed to compel work from the
laziest and intelligence from the dullest by the mere word of her will.
What was more, her nature was too large for vanity; she held her
worshippers at arm's length and consecrated her power of personal
seduction to strictly intellectual ends. At the end of her first term her
position was second only to the Head. If Miss Cursiter was the will and
intelligence of St. Sidwell's, Rhoda Vivian was its subtle poetry and its
soul. And Miss Cursiter meant to keep her there; being a woman who made
all sacrifices and demanded them.

So now, while Miss Cursiter stood explaining, ostensibly to the entire
staff, the unique advantages of General Culture, it was to Rhoda Vivian
as to a supreme audience that she addressed her deeper thought and her
finer phrase. If Miss Cursiter had not had to consult her notes now and
again, she must have seen that Rhoda Vivian's mind was wandering, that
the Classical Mistress was if anything more interested in her companions
than in the noble utterances of the Head. As her grey eyes swept the
tiers of faces, they lingered on that corner where Miss Quincey seemed
perpetually striving to suppress, consume, and utterly obliterate
herself. And each time she smiled, as she had smiled earlier in the day
when first she saw Miss Quincey.

For Miss Quincey was there, far back in the ranks of the brilliant and
efficient. Note-book on desk, she followed the quick march of thought
with a fatigued and stumbling brain. She was painfully, ludicrously out
of step; yet to judge by the light that shone now and then in her eyes,
by the smile that played about the corners of her weak, tender mouth, she
too had caught the sympathetic rapture, the intellectual thrill. Ready to
drop was Miss Quincey, but she would not have missed that illuminating
hour, not if you had paid her--three times her salary. It was her one
glimpse of the larger life; her one point of contact with the ideal. Her
pencil staggered over her note-book as Miss Cursiter flamed and lightened
in her peroration.

"We have looked at our subject in the light of the ideals by which and
for which we live. Let us now turn to the practical side of the matter,
as it touches our business and our bosoms. Do not say we have no room for
poetry in our crowded days." A score of weary heads looked up; there was
a vague inquiry in all eyes. "You have your evenings--all of you. Much
can be done with evenings; if your training has done nothing else for you
it has taught you the economy of time. You are tired in the evenings,
yes. But the poets, Shakespeare, Tennyson, and Browning, are the great
healers and regenerators of worn-out humanity. When you are faint and
weary with your day's work, the best thing you can do is to rise and
refresh yourselves at the living wells of literature."

Long before the closing sentence Miss Quincey's MS. had become a
sightless blur. But she had managed to jot down in her neat arithmetical
way: "Poets = healers and regenerators."

The address was printed and a copy was given to each member of the staff.
Miss Quincey treasured up hers as a priceless scripture.

Miss Quincey was aware of her shortcomings and had struggled hard to mend
them, toiling pantingly after those younger ones who had attained the
standard of brilliance and efficiency. She joined the Teachers' Debating
Society. Not that she debated. She had once put some elementary questions
in an inaudible voice, and had been requested to speak a little louder,
whereupon she sank into her seat and spoke no more. But she heard a great
deal. About the emancipation of women; about the women's labour market;
about the doors that were now thrown open to women. She was told that all
they wanted was a fair field and no favour. (The speaker, a rosy-cheeked
child of one-and-twenty, was quite violent in her repudiation of favour.)
And Miss Quincey believed it all, though she understood very little about
it.

But it was illumination, a new gospel to her, this doctrine of General
Culture; it was the large easy-fitting formula which she had seemed to
need. With touching simplicity she determined to follow the course
recommended by the Head. Though by the time she had corrected some
seventy manuscripts in marble-backed covers, and prepared her lesson for
the next day, she had nothing but the fag-end of her brain to give to the
healers and regenerators; as for rising, Miss Quincey felt much more like
going to bed, and it was as much as she could do to drag her poor little
body there. Still Miss Quincey was nothing if not heroic; night after
night twelve o'clock would find her painfully trying to draw water from
the wells of literature. She had begun upon Browning; set herself to read
through the whole of _Sordello_ from beginning to end. It is as easy as a
sum in arithmetic if you don't bother your head too much about the
Guelphs and Ghibellines and the metaphors and things, and if you take it
in short fits, say three pages every evening. Never any more, or you
might go to sleep and forget all about it; never any less, or you would
have bad arrears. As there are exactly two hundred and thirteen pages,
she calculated that she would finish it in ten weeks and a day. There was
no place for Miss Quincey and her pile of marble-backed exercise-books in
the dim and dingy first-floor drawing-room (Mrs. Moon and the
bandy-legged cabinet would have had something to say to that). All this
terrific intellectual travail went on in a dimmer and dingier dining-room
beneath it.

Then one night, old Martha, disturbed by sounds that came from Miss
Juliana's bedroom, groped her way fumblingly in and found Miss Juliana
sitting up in her sleep and posing the darkness with a problem.

"If," said Miss Juliana, "three men can finish one hundred and nineteen
hogsheads of Browning in eight weeks, how long will it take seven women
to finish a thousand and forty-five--forty-five--forty-five, if one woman
works twice as hard as eleven men?"

Martha shook her head and went fumbling back to bed again; and being a
conscientious servant she said nothing about it for fear of frightening
the old lady.

About a fortnight later, Rhoda Vivian, sailing down the corridor, came
upon the little arithmetic teacher all sick and tremulous, leaning up
against the hot-water pipes beside a pile of exercise-books. The sweat
streamed from her sallow forehead, and her face was white and drawn. She
could give no rational account of herself, but offered two hypotheses as
equally satisfactory; either she had taken a bad chill, or else the hot
air from the water-pipes had turned her faint. Rhoda picked up the pile
of exercise-books and led her into the dressing-room, and Miss Quincey
was docile and ridiculously grateful. She was glad that Miss Vivian was
going to take her home. She even smiled her little pinched smile and
pressed Rhoda's hand as she said, "A friend in need is a friend indeed."
Rhoda would have given anything to be able to return the pressure and the
sentiment, but Rhoda was too desperately sincere. She was sorry for Miss
Quincey; but all her youth, unfettered and unfeeling, revolted from the
bond of friendship. So she only stooped and laced up the shabby boots,
and fastened the thin cape by its solitary button. The touch of Miss
Quincey's clothes thrilled her with a pang of pity, and she could have
wept over the unutterable pathos of her hat. In form and substance it was
a rock, beaten by the weather; its limp ribbons clung to it like seaweed
washed up and abandoned by the tide. When Miss Quincey's head was inside
it the hat seemed to become one with Miss Quincey; you could not conceive
anything more melancholy and forlorn. Rhoda was beautifully attired in
pale grey cloth. Rhoda wore golden sables about her throat, and a big
black Gainsborough hat on the top of her head, a hat that Miss Quincey
would have thought a little daring and theatrical on anybody else; but
Rhoda wore it and looked like a Puritan princess. Rhoda's clothes were
enough to show that she was a woman for whom a profession is a
superfluity, a luxury.

Rhoda sent for a hansom, and having left Miss Quincey at her home went
off in search of a doctor. She had insisted on a doctor, in spite of Miss
Quincey's protestations. After exploring a dozen dingy streets and
conceiving a deep disgust for Camden Town, she walked back to find her
man in the neighbourhood of St. Sidwell's.




CHAPTER IV

Bastian Cautley, M.D.


It was half-past five and Dr. Bastian Cautley had put on his house
jacket, loosened his waistcoat, settled down by his library fire with a
pipe and a book, and was thanking Heaven that for once he had an hour to
himself between his afternoon round and his time for consultation. He had
been working hard ever since nine o'clock in the morning; but now nobody
could have looked more superlatively lazy than Bastian Cautley as he
stretched himself on two armchairs in an attitude of reckless ease. His
very intellect (the most unrestful part of him) was at rest; all his
weary being merged in a confused voluptuous sensation, a beatific state
in which smoking became a higher kind of thinking, and thought betrayed
an increasing tendency to end in smoke. The room was double-walled with
book-shelves, and but for the far away underground humming of a happy
maidservant the house was soundless. He rejoiced to think that there was
not a soul in it above stairs to disturb his deep tranquility. At six
o'clock he would have to take his legs off that chair, and get into a
frock-coat; once in the frock-coat he would become another man, all
patience and politeness. After six there would be no pipe and no peace
for him, but the knocking and ringing at his front door would go on
incessantly till seven-thirty. There was flattery in every knock, for it
meant that Dr. Cautley was growing eminent, and that at the ridiculously
early age of nine-and-twenty.

There was a sharp ring now. He turned wearily in his chairs.

"There's another damned patient," said Dr. Cautley.

He was really so eminent that he could afford to think blasphemously of
patients; and he had no love for those who came to consult him before
their time. He sat up with his irritable nerves on edge. The servant was
certainly letting somebody in, and from the soft rustling sounds in the
hall he gathered that somebody was a woman; much patience and much
politeness would then be required of him, and he was feeling anything but
patient and polite.

"Miss Rhoda Vivian" was the name on the card that was brought to him. He
did not know Miss Rhoda Vivian.

The gas-jets were turned low in the consulting-room; when he raised them
he saw a beautiful woman standing by the fire in an attitude of
impatience. He had kept her waiting; and it seemed that this adorable
person knew the value of time. She was not going to waste words either.
As it was impossible to associate her with the ordinary business of the
place, he was prepared for her terse and lucid statement of somebody
else's case. He said he would look round early in the morning (Miss
Vivian looked dissatisfied); or perhaps that evening (Miss Vivian was
dubious); or possibly at once (Miss Vivian smiled in hurried approval).
She was eager to be gone. And when she had gone he stood deliberating.
Miss Quincey was a pathological abstraction, Miss Vivian was a radiant
reality; it was clear that Miss Quincey was not urgent, and that once
safe in her bed she could very well wait till to-morrow; but when he
thought of Miss Vivian he became impressed with the gravity and interest
of Miss Quincey's case.

While the doctor was making up his mind, little Miss Quincey, in her
shabby back bedroom, lay waiting for him, trembling, fretting her nerves
into a fever, starting at imaginary footsteps, and entertaining all kinds
of dismal possibilities. She was convinced that she was going to die, or
worse still, to break down, to be a perpetual invalid. She thought of
several likely illnesses, beginning with general paralysis and ending
with anemia of the brain. It _might_ be anemia of the brain, but she
rather thought it would be general paralysis, because this would be so
much the more disagreeable of the two. Anyhow Rhoda Vivian must have
thought she was pretty bad or she would not have called in a doctor. To
call in a doctor seemed to Miss Quincey next door to invoking Providence
itself; it was the final desperate resort, implying catastrophe and the
end of all things. Oh, dear! Miss Quincey wished he would come up if he
was coming, and get it over.

After all he did not keep her waiting long, and it was over in five
minutes. And yet it was amazing the amount of observation, and insight,
and solid concentrated thought the young man contrived to pack into those
five minutes.

Well--it seemed that it was not general paralysis this time, nor yet
anemia of the brain; but he could tell her more about it in the morning.
Meanwhile she had nothing to do but to do what he told her and stay where
she was till he saw her again. And he was gone before she realized that
he had been there.

Again? So he was coming again, was he? Miss Quincey did not know whether
to be glad or sorry. His presence had given her a rare and curiously
agreeable sense of protection, but she had to think of the expense. She
had to think too of what Mrs. Moon would say to it--of what she would say
to him.

Mrs. Moon had a good deal to say to it. She took Juliana's illness as a
personal affront, as a deliberate back-handed blow struck at the memory
of Tollington Moon. With all the base implications of her daily acts,
Juliana had never attempted anything like this.

"Capers and nonsense," she said, "Juliana has never had an illness in her
life."

She said it to Rhoda Vivian, the bold young person who had taken upon
herself to bring the doctor into the house. Mrs. Moon spoke of the doctor
as if he was a disease.

Fortunately Miss Vivian was by when he endured the first terrifying
encounter. Her manner suggested that she took him under her protection,
stood between him and some unfathomable hostility.

He found the Old Lady disentangling herself with immense dignity from her
maze of furniture. Mrs. Moon was a small woman shrunk with her eighty
years, shrunk almost to extinction in her black woollen gown and black
woollen mittens. Her very face seemed to be vanishing under the immense
shadow of her black net cap. Spirals of thin grey hair stuck flat to her
forehead; she wore other and similar spirals enclosed behind glass in an
enormous brooch; it was the hair of her ancestors, that is to say of the
Quinceys. As the Old Lady looked at Cautley her little black eyes burned
like pinpoints pierced in a paste-board mask.

"I think you've been brought here on a wild goose chase, doctor," said
she, "there is nothing the matter with my niece."

He replied (battling sternly with his desire to laugh) that he would be
delighted if it were so; adding that a wild goose chase was the sport he
preferred to any other.

Here he looked at Miss Vivian to the imminent peril of his self-control.
Mrs. Moon's gaze had embraced them in a common condemnation, and the
subtle sympathy of their youth linked them closer and made them one in
their intimate appreciation of her.

"Then you must be a very singular young man. I thought you doctors were
never happy until you'd found some mare's nest in people's constitutions?
You'd much better let well alone."

"Miss Quincey is very far from well," said Cautley with recovered
gravity, "and I rather fancy she has been let alone too long."

Cautley thought that he had said quite enough to alarm any old lady. And
indeed Mrs. Moon was slowly taking in the idea of disaster, and it sent
her poor wits wandering in the past. Her voice sank suddenly from
grating; antagonism to pensive garrulity.

"I've no faith in medicine," she quavered, "nor in medical men either.
Though to be sure my husband had a brother-in-law once on his wife's
side, Dr. Quincey, Dr. Arnold Quincey, Juliana's father and Louisa's. He
was a medical man. He wrote a book, I daresay you've heard of it;
_Quincey on Diseases of the Heart_ it was. But he's dead now, of one of
'em, poor man. We haven't seen a doctor for five-and-twenty years."

"Then isn't it almost time that you should see one now?" said he,
cheerfully taking his leave. "I shall look round again in the morning."

He looked round again in the morning and sat half an hour with Miss
Quincey; so she had time to take a good look at him.

He was very nice to look at, this young man. He was so clean-cut and tall
and muscular; he had such an intellectual forehead; his mouth was so
firm, you could trust it to tell no secrets; and his eyes (they were dark
and deep set) looked as if they saw nothing but Miss Quincey. Indeed, at
the moment he had forgotten all about Rhoda Vivian, and did see nothing
but the little figure in the bed looking more like a rather worn and
wizened child than a middle-aged woman. He was very gentle and
sympathetic; but for that his youth would have been terrible to her. As
it was, Miss Quincey felt a little bit in awe of this clever doctor, who
in spite of his cleverness looked so young, and not only so young but so
formidably fastidious and refined. She had not expected him to look like
that. All the clever young men she had met had displayed a noble contempt
for appearances. To be sure, Miss Quincey knew but little of the world of
men; for at St. Sidwell's the types were limited to three little
eccentric professors, and the plaster gods in the art studio. But for the
gods she might just as well have lived in a nunnery, for whenever Miss
Quincey thought of a man she thought of something like Louisa's husband,
Andrew Mackinnon, who spoke with a strong Scotch accent, and wore flannel
shirts with celluloid collars, and coats that hung about him all anyhow.
But Dr. Cautley was not in the least like Andrew Mackinnon. He had a
distinguished voice; his clothes fitted him to perfection; and his linen,
irreproachable itself, reproved her silently.

Her eyes left him suddenly and wandered about the room. She was full of
little tremors and agitations; she wished that the towels wouldn't look
so much like dish-cloths; she credited him with powers of microscopic
observation, and wondered if he had noticed the stain on the carpet and
the dust on the book-shelves, and if he would be likely to mistake the
quinine tabloids for vulgar liver pills, or her bottle of hair-wash for
hair-dye. Once released from its unnatural labours, her mind returned
instinctively to the trivial as to its home. She glanced at her hat,
perched conspicuously on the knob of the looking-glass, and a dim sense
of its imperfections came over her and vanished as it came. Then she
tried to compose herself for the verdict.

It did not come all at once. First of all he asked her a great many
questions about herself and her family, whereupon she gave him a complete
pathological story of the Moons and Quinceys. And all the time he looked
so hard at her that it was quite embarrassing. His eyes seemed to be
taking her in (no other eyes had ever performed that act of hospitality
for Miss Quincey). He pulled out a little book from his pocket and made
notes of everything she said; Miss Quincey's biography was written in
that little book (you may be sure nobody else had ever thought of writing
it). And when he had finished the biography he talked to her about her
work (nobody else had ever been the least interested in Miss Quincey's
work). Then Miss Quincey sat up in bed and became lyrical as she
described the delirious joy of decimals--recurring decimals--and the
rapture of cube-root. She herself had never got farther than cube-root;
but it was enough. Beyond that, she hinted, lay the infinite. And Dr.
Cautley laughed at her defence of the noble science. Oh yes, he could
understand its fascination, its irresistible appeal to the emotions; he
only wished to remind her that it was the most debilitating study in the
world. He refused to commit himself to any opinion as to the original
strength and magnitude of Miss Quincey's brain; he could only assure her
that the most powerful intellect in the world would break down if you
kept it perpetually doing sums in arithmetic. It was the monotony of the
thing, you see; year after year Miss Quincey had been ploughing up the
same little patch of brain. No, certainly _not_--she mustn't think of
going back to St. Sidwell's for another three months.

Three months! Impossible! It was a whole term.

Dr. Cautley scowled horribly and said that if she was ever to be fit for
cube-root and decimals again, she positively and absolutely _must_.
Whereupon Miss Quincey gave way to emotion.

To leave St. Sidwell's, abandon her post for three months, she who had
never been absent for a day! If she did that it would be all up with Miss
Quincey; a hundred eager applicants were ready to fill her empty place.
It was as if she heard the hungry, leaping pack behind her, the strong
young animals trained for the chase; they came tearing on the scent,
hunting her, treading her down.

When Rhoda Vivian looked in after morning school, she found a flushed and
embarrassed young man trying to soothe Miss Quincey, who paid not the
least attention to him; she seemed to have shrunk into her bed, and lay
there staring with dilated eyes like a hare crouched flat and trembling
in her form. From the other side of the bed Dr. Cautley's helpless and
desperate smile claimed Rhoda as his ally. It seemed to say, "For God's
sake take my part against this unreasonable woman."

Now no one (not even Miss Quincey) could realize the insecurity of Miss
Quincey's position better than Rhoda, who was fathoms deep in the
confidence of the Head. She happened to know that Miss Cursiter was only
waiting for an opportunity like this to rid herself for ever of the
little obstructive. She knew too that once they had ceased to fill their
particular notch in it, the world had no further use for people like Miss
Quincey; that she, Rhoda Vivian, belonged to the new race whose eternal
destiny was to precipitate their doom. It was the first time that Rhoda
had thought of it in that light; the first time indeed that she had
greatly concerned herself with any career beside her own. She sat for a
few minutes talking to Miss Quincey and thinking as she talked. Perhaps
she was wondering how she would like to be forty-five and incompetent; to
be overtaken on the terrible middle-way; to feel the hurrying generations
after her, their breath on her shoulders, their feet on her heels; to
have no hope; to see Mrs. Moon sitting before her, immovable and
symbolic, the image of what she must become. They were two very absurd
and diminutive figures, but they stood for a good deal.

To Cautley, Rhoda herself as she revolved these things looked significant
enough. Leaning forward, one elbow bent on her knee, her chin propped on
her hand, her lips pouting, her forehead knit, she might have been a
young and passionate Pallas, brooding tempestuously on the world.

"Miss Vivian is on my side, I see. I'll leave her to do the fighting."

And he left her.

Rhoda's first movement was to capture Miss Quincey's hand as it wildly
reconnoitred for a pocket handkerchief among the pillows.

"Don't worry about it," she said, "I'll speak to Miss Cursiter."

Dr. Cautley, enduring a perfunctory five minutes with Mrs. Moon, could
hear Miss Vivian running downstairs and the front door opening and
closing upon her. With a little haste and discretion he managed to
overtake her before she had gone very far. He stopped to give his verdict
on her friend.

She had expected him.

"Well," she asked, "it _is_ overwork, isn't it?"

"Very much overwork; and no wonder. I knew she was a St. Sidwell's woman
as soon as I saw her."

"That was clever of you. And do you always know a St. Sidwell's woman
when you see one?"

"I do; they all go like this, more or less. It seems to me that St.
Sidwell's sacrifices its women to its girls, and its girls to itself. I
don't imagine you've much to do with the place, so you won't mind my
saying so."

Rhoda smiled a little maliciously.

"You seem to take a great deal for granted. As it happens I am Classical
Mistress there."

Dr. Cautley looked at her and bit his lip. He was annoyed with himself
for his blunder and with her for being anything but Rhoda Vivian--pure
and simple.

Rhoda laughed frankly at his confusion.

"Never mind. Appearances are deceitful. I'm glad I don't look like it."

"You certainly do not. Still, Miss Quincey is a warning to anybody."

"She? She was never fit for the life."

"No. Your race is to the swift and your battle to the strong."

He was still looking at her as he spoke. She was looking straight before
her, her nostrils slightly distended, her grey eyes wide, as if she
sniffed the battle, saw the goal.

"We must make her strong," said he.

She had quickened her pace as if under a renewed impulse of energy and
will. Suddenly at the door of the College she stopped and held out her
hand.

"You will look after her well, will you not?" Her voice was resonant on
the note of appeal.

Now you could withstand Rhoda in her domineering mood if you were strong
enough and cool enough; but when she looked straight through your eyes in
that way she was irresistible. Cautley did not attempt to resist her.

He went on his way thinking how intolerable the question might have been
in some one else's mouth; how suggestive of impertinent coquetry, the
beautiful woman's assumption that he would do for her what he would not
do for insignificant Miss Quincey. She had taken it for granted that his
interest in Miss Quincey was supreme.




CHAPTER V

Healers and Regenerators


Rhoda had spoken to Miss Cursiter. Nobody ever knew what she said to
her, but the next day Miss Cursiter's secretary had the pleasure to
inform Miss Quincey that she would have leave of absence for three
months, and that her place would be kept for her.

Miss Quincey had become a person of importance. Old Martha fumbled about,
unnaturally attentive, even Mrs. Moon acknowledged Juliana's right to be
ill if her foolish mind were set on it. There was nothing active or
spontaneous in the Old Lady's dislike of her niece, it was simply a habit
she had got.

An agreeable sense of her dignity stole in on the little woman of no
account. She knew and everybody knew that hers was no vulgar illness.
It was brain exhaustion; altogether a noble and transcendental
affair; Miss Quincey was a victim of the intellectual life. In all the
five-and-twenty years she had worked there St. Sidwell's had never heard
so much about Miss Quincey's brain. And on her part Miss Quincey was
surprised to find that she had so many friends. Day after day the
teachers left their cards and sympathy; the girls sent flowers with love;
there were even messages of inquiry from Miss Cursiter. And not only
flowers and sympathy, but more solid testimonials poured in from St.
Sidwell's, parcels which by some curious coincidence contained everything
that Dr. Cautley had suggested and Miss Quincey refused on the grounds
that she "couldn't fancy it." For a long time Miss Quincey was supremely
happy in the belief that these delicacies were sent by the Head; and she
said to herself that one had only to be laid aside a little while for
one's worth to be appreciated. It was as if a veil of blessed illusion
had been spread between her and her world; and nobody knew whose fingers
had been busy in weaving it so close and fine.

Dr. Cautley came every day and always at the same time. At first he was
pretty sure to find Miss Vivian, sitting with Miss Quincey or drinking
tea in perilous intimacy with Mrs. Moon. Then came a long spell when,
time it as he would, he never saw her at all. Rhoda had taken it into her
head to choose six o'clock for her visits, and at six he was bound to be
at home for consultations. But Rhoda or no Rhoda, he kept his promise. He
was looking well after Miss Quincey. He would have done that as a matter
of course; for his worst enemies--and he had several--could not say that
Cautley ever neglected his poorer patients. Only he concentrated or
dissipated himself according to the nature of the case, giving five
minutes to one and twenty to another. When he could he gave half-hours to
Miss Quincey. He was absorbed, excited; he battled by her bedside; his
spirits went up and down with every fluctuation of her pulse; you would
have thought that Miss Quincey's case was one of exquisite interest,
rarity and charm, and that Cautley had staked his reputation on her
recovery. When he said to her in his emphatic way, "We _must_ get you
well, Miss Quincey," his manner implied that it would be a very serious
thing for the universe if Miss Quincey did not get well. When he looked
at her his eyes seemed to be taking her in, taking her in, seeing nothing
in all the world but her.