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fascination for her. It was so hard and ugly, so relentlessly

ugly, it would purge her of some of her floating

sentimentality.

She dreamed how she would make the little, ugly children love

her. She would be so personal. Teachers were always so

hard and impersonal. There was no vivid relationship. She would

make everything personal and vivid, she would give herself, she

would give, give, give all her great stores of wealth to her

children, she would make them so happy, and they would prefer

her to any teacher on the face of the earth.

At Christmas she would choose such fascinating Christmas

cards for them, and she would give them such a happy party in

one of the class-rooms.

The headmaster, Mr. Harby, was a short, thick-set, rather

common man, she thought. But she would hold before him the light

of grace and refinement, he would have her in such high esteem

before long. She would be the gleaming sun of the school, the

children would blossom like little weeds, the teachers like

tall, hard plants would burst into rare flower.

The Monday morning came. It was the end of September, and a

drizzle of fine rain like veils round her, making her seem

intimate, a world to herself. She walked forward to the new

land. The old was blotted out. The veil would be rent that hid

the new world. She was gripped hard with suspense as she went

down the hill in the rain, carrying her dinner-bag.

Through the thin rain she saw the town, a black, extensive

mount. She must enter in upon it. She felt at once a feeling of

repugnance and of excited fulfilment. But she shrank.

She waited at the terminus for the tram. Here it was

beginning. Before her was the station to Nottingham, whence

Theresa had gone to school half an hour before; behind her was

the little church school she had attended when she was a child,

when her grandmother was alive. Her grandmother had been dead

two years now. There was a strange woman at the Marsh, with her

Uncle Fred, and a small baby. Behind her was Cossethay, and

blackberries were ripe on the hedges.

As she waited at the tram-terminus she reverted swiftly to

her childhood; her teasing grandfather, with his fair beard and

blue eyes, and his big, monumental body; he had got drowned: her

grandmother, whom Ursula would sometimes say she had loved more

than anyone else in the world: the little church school, the

Phillips boys; one was a soldier in the Life Guards now, one was

a collier. With a passion she clung to the past.

But as she dreamed of it, she heard the tram-car grinding

round a bend, rumbling dully, she saw it draw into sight, and

hum nearer. It sidled round the loop at the terminus, and came

to a standstill, looming above her. Some shadowy grey people

stepped from the far end, the conductor was walking in the

puddles, swinging round the pole.

She mounted into the wet, comfortless tram, whose floor was

dark with wet, whose windows were all steamed, and she sat in

suspense. It had begun, her new existence.

One other passenger mounted--a sort of charwoman with a

drab, wet coat. Ursula could not bear the waiting of the tram.

The bell clanged, there was a lurch forward. The car moved

cautiously down the wet street. She was being carried forward,

into her new existence. Her heart burned with pain and suspense,

as if something were cutting her living tissue.

Often, oh often the tram seemed to stop, and wet, cloaked

people mounted and sat mute and grey in stiff rows opposite her,

their umbrellas between their knees. The windows of the tram

grew more steamy; opaque. She was shut in with these unliving,

spectral people. Even yet it did not occur to her that she was

one of them. The conductor came down issuing tickets. Each

little ring of his clipper sent a pang of dread through her. But

her ticket surely was different from the rest.

They were all going to work; she also was going to work. Her

ticket was the same. She sat trying to fit in with them. But

fear was at her bowels, she felt an unknown, terrible grip upon

her.

At Bath Street she must dismount and change trams. She looked

uphill. It seemed to lead to freedom. She remembered the many

Saturday afternoons she had walked up to the shops. How free and

careless she had been!

Ah, her tram was sliding gingerly downhill. She dreaded every

yard of her conveyance. The car halted, she mounted hastily.

She kept turning her head as the car ran on, because she was

uncertain of the street. At last, her heart a flame of suspense,

trembling, she rose. The conductor rang the bell brusquely.

She was walking down a small, mean, wet street, empty of

people. The school squatted low within its railed, asphalt yard,

that shone black with rain. The building was grimy, and

horrible, dry plants were shadowily looking through the

windows.

She entered the arched doorway of the porch. The whole place

seemed to have a threatening expression, imitating the church's

architecture, for the purpose of domineering, like a gesture of

vulgar authority. She saw that one pair of feet had paddled

across the flagstone floor of the porch. The place was silent,

deserted, like an empty prison waiting the return of tramping

feet.

Ursula went forward to the teachers' room that burrowed in a

gloomy hole. She knocked timidly.

"Come in!" called a surprised man's voice, as from a prison

cell. She entered the dark little room that never got any sun.

The gas was lighted naked and raw. At the table a thin man in

shirt-sleeves was rubbing a paper on a jellytray. He looked up

at Ursula with his narrow, sharp face, said "Good morning," then

turned away again, and stripped the paper off the tray, glancing

at the violet-coloured writing transferred, before he dropped

the curled sheet aside among a heap.

Ursula watched him fascinated. In the gaslight and gloom and

the narrowness of the room, all seemed unreal.

"Isn't it a nasty morning," she said.

"Yes," he said, "it's not much of weather."

But in here it seemed that neither morning nor weather really

existed. This place was timeless. He spoke in an occupied voice,

like an echo. Ursula did not know what to say. She took off her

waterproof.

"Am I early?" she asked.

The man looked first at a little clock, then at her. His eyes

seemed to be sharpened to needle-points of vision.

"Twenty-five past," he said. "You're the second to come. I'm

first this morning."

Ursula sat down gingerly on the edge of a chair, and watched

his thin red hands rubbing away on the white surface of the

paper, then pausing, pulling up a corner of the sheet, peering,

and rubbing away again. There was a great heap of curled

white-and-scribbled sheets on the table.

"Must you do so many?" asked Ursula.

Again the man glanced up sharply. He was about thirty or

thirty-three years old, thin, greenish, with a long nose and a

sharp face. His eyes were blue, and sharp as points of steel,

rather beautiful, the girl thought.

"Sixty-three," he answered.

"So many!" she said, gently. Then she remembered.

"But they're not all for your class, are they?" she

added.

"Why aren't they?" he replied, a fierceness in his voice.

Ursula was rather frightened by his mechanical ignoring of

her, and his directness of statement. It was something new to

her. She had never been treated like this before, as if she did

not count, as if she were addressing a machine.

"It is too many," she said sympathetically.

"You'll get about the same," he said.

That was all she received. She sat rather blank, not knowing

how to feel. Still she liked him. He seemed so cross. There was

a queer, sharp, keen-edge feeling about him that attracted her

and frightened her at the same time. It was so cold, and against

his nature.

The door opened, and a short, neutral-tinted young woman of

about twenty-eight appeared.

"Oh, Ursula!" the newcomer exclaimed. "You are here early! My

word, I'll warrant you don't keep it up. That's Mr. Williamson's

peg. This is yours. Standard Five teacher always has this.

Aren't you going to take your hat off?"

Miss Violet Harby removed Ursula's waterproof from the peg on

which it was hung, to one a little farther down the row. She had

already snatched the pins from her own stuff hat, and jammed

them through her coat. She turned to Ursula, as she pushed up

her frizzed, flat, dun-coloured hair.

"Isn't it a beastly morning," she exclaimed, "beastly! And if

there's one thing I hate above another it's a wet Monday

morning;--pack of kids trailing in anyhow-nohow, and no

holding 'em----"

She had taken a black pinafore from a newspaper package, and

was tying it round her waist.

"You've brought an apron, haven't you?" she said jerkily,

glancing at Ursula. "Oh--you'll want one. You've no idea

what a sight you'll look before half-past four, what with chalk

and ink and kids' dirty feet.--Well, I can send a boy down

to mamma's for one."

"Oh, it doesn't matter," said Ursula.

"Oh, yes--I can send easily," cried Miss Harby.

Ursula's heart sank. Everybody seemed so cocksure and so

bossy. How was she going to get on with such jolty, jerky, bossy

people? And Miss Harby had not spoken a word to the man at the

table. She simply ignored him. Ursula felt the callous crude

rudeness between the two teachers.

The two girls went out into the passage. A few children were

already clattering in the porch.

"Jim Richards," called Miss Harby, hard and authoritative. A

boy came sheepishly forward.

"Shall you go down to our house for me, eh?" said Miss Harby,

in a commanding, condescending, coaxing voice. She did not wait

for an answer. "Go down and ask mamma to send me one of my

school pinas, for Miss Brangwen--shall you?"

The boy muttered a sheepish "Yes, miss," and was moving

away.

"Hey," called Miss Harby. "Come here--now what are you

going for? What shall you say to mamma?"

"A school pina----" muttered the boy.

"'Please, Mrs. Harby, Miss Harby says will you send her

another school pinafore for Miss Brangwen, because she's come

without one.'"

"Yes, miss," muttered the boy, head ducked, and was moving

off. Miss Harby caught him back, holding him by the

shoulder.

"What are you going to say?"

"Please, Mrs. Harby, Miss Harby wants a pinny for Miss

Brangwin," muttered the boy very sheepishly.

"Miss Brangwen!" laughed Miss Harby, pushing him away. "Here,

you'd better have my umbrella--wait a minute."

The unwilling boy was rigged up with Miss Harby's umbrella,

and set off.

"Don't take long over it," called Miss Harby, after him. Then

she turned to Ursula, and said brightly:

"Oh, he's a caution, that lad--but not bad, you

know."

"No," Ursula agreed, weakly.

The latch of the door clicked, and they entered the big room.

Ursula glanced down the place. Its rigid, long silence was

official and chilling. Half-way down was a glass partition, the

doors of which were open. A clock ticked re-echoing, and Miss

Harby's voice sounded double as she said:

"This is the big room--Standard

Five-Six-and-Seven.--Here's your

place--Five----"

She stood in the near end of the great room. There was a

small high teacher's desk facing a squadron of long benches, two

high windows in the wall opposite.

It was fascinating and horrible to Ursula. The curious,

unliving light in the room changed her character. She thought it

was the rainy morning. Then she looked up again, because of the

horrid feeling of being shut in a rigid, inflexible air, away

from all feeling of the ordinary day; and she noticed that the

windows were of ribbed, suffused glass.

The prison was round her now! She looked at the walls, colour

washed, pale green and chocolate, at the large windows with

frowsy geraniums against the pale glass, at the long rows of

desks, arranged in a squadron, and dread filled her. This was a

new world, a new life, with which she was threatened. But still

excited, she climbed into her chair at her teacher's desk. It

was high, and her feet could not reach the ground, but must rest

on the step. Lifted up there, off the ground, she was in office.

How queer, how queer it all was! How different it was from the

mist of rain blowing over Cossethay. As she thought of her own

village, a spasm of yearning crossed her, it seemed so far off,

so lost to her.

She was here in this hard, stark reality--reality. It

was queer that she should call this the reality, which she had

never known till to-day, and which now so filled her with dread

and dislike, that she wished she might go away. This was the

reality, and Cossethay, her beloved, beautiful, wellknown

Cossethay, which was as herself unto her, that was minor

reality. This prison of a school was reality. Here, then, she

would sit in state, the queen of scholars! Here she would

realize her dream of being the beloved teacher bringing light

and joy to her children! But the desks before her had an

abstract angularity that bruised her sentiment and made her

shrink. She winced, feeling she had been a fool in her

anticipations. She had brought her feelings and her generosity

to where neither generosity nor emotion were wanted. And already

she felt rebuffed, troubled by the new atmosphere, out of

place.

She slid down, and they returned to the teacher's room. It

was queer to feel that one ought to alter one's personality. She

was nobody, there was no reality in herself, the reality was all

outside of her, and she must apply herself to it.

Mr. Harby was in the teachers' room, standing before a big,