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.
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