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