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.