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.
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