ain, she said:

"Seven hats at twopence ha'penny each?"

A grin went over the faces of the class, seeing her commence.
She was red and suffering. Then some hands shot up like blades,
and she asked for the answer.

The day passed incredibly slowly. She never knew what to do,
there came horrible gaps, when she was merely exposed to the
children; and when, relying on some pert little girl for
information, she had started a lesson, she did not know how to
go on with it properly. The children were her masters. She
deferred to them. She could always hear Mr. Brunt. Like a
machine, always in the same hard, high, inhuman voice he went on
with his teaching, oblivious of everything. And before this
inhuman number of children she was always at bay. She could not
get away from it. There it was, this class of fifty collective
children, depending on her for command, for command it hated and
resented. It made her feel she could not breathe: she must
suffocate, it was so inhuman. They were so many, that they were
not children. They were a squadron. She could not speak as she
would to a child, because they were not individual children,
they were a collective, inhuman thing.

Dinner-time came, and stunned, bewildered, solitary, she went
into the teachers' room for dinner. Never had she felt such a
stranger to life before. It seemed to her she had just
disembarked from some strange horrible state where everything
was as in hell, a condition of hard, malevolent system. And she
was not really free. The afternoon drew at her like some
bondage.

The first week passed in a blind confusion. She did not know
how to teach, and she felt she never would know. Mr. Harby came
down every now and then to her class, to see what she was doing.
She felt so incompetent as he stood by, bullying and
threatening, so unreal, that she wavered, became neutral and
non-existent. But he stood there watching with the
listening-genial smile of the eyes, that was really threatening;
he said nothing, he made her go on teaching, she felt she had no
soul in her body. Then he went away, and his going was like a
derision. The class was his class. She was a wavering
substitute. He thrashed and bullied, he was hated. But he was
master. Though she was gentle and always considerate of her
class, yet they belonged to Mr. Harby, and they did not belong
to her. Like some invincible source of the mechanism he kept all
power to himself. And the class owned his power. And