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Updated: May 11, 2025
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 flung up the game. Miss Cursiter saw it. "I was right," said she. "You are under an influence, and a dangerous one." 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."
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.
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.
Miss Quincey's somewhat eccentric behaviour filled her with misgivings; and in order to investigate her case at leisure, she chose the first afternoon when Miss Cursiter was not at home to ask the little arithmetic teacher to lunch.
Now as it happened, Cautley did champion certain theories which Miss Cursiter, when she met them, denounced as physiologist's fads. But it was not they, nor yet Miss Quincey, that accounted for his display of feeling. He was angry because he wanted to come to a certain understanding with the Classical Mistress; to come to it at once; and the system kept him waiting.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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