She treated the schoolmaster's dream as vapour, and the old days as dead and ghostless.

She did rightly.

How could they or she or he be other than they were! With that sage exclamation, he headed into the Browny days and breasted them; and he had about him the living foamy sparkle of the very time, until the Countess of Ormont breathed the word "Schoolmaster"; when, at once, it was dusty land where buoyant waters had been, and the armies of the facts, in uniform drab, with some feathers and laces, and a significant surpliced figure, decorously covering the wildest of Cupids, marched the standard of the winking gold-piece, which is their nourishing sun and eclipser of all suns that foster dreams.
As you perceive, he was drawing swiftly to the vortex of the fools, and round and round he went, lucky to float.
His view of the business of the schoolmaster plucked him from the whirl.
She despised it; he upheld it.

He stuck to his view, finding their antagonism on the subject wholesome for him.

All that she succeeded in doing was to rob it of the aurora colour clothing everything on which Matey Weyburn set his aim.