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 She worked with the desperate zeal of the superseded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.
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