in her own
personality.

So that she was in a very deep mess. In the first place she
was offering to a class a relationship which only one or two of
the children were sensitive enough to appreciate, so that the
mass were left outsiders, therefore against her. Secondly, she
was placing herself in passive antagonism to the one fixed
authority of Mr. Harby, so that the scholars could more safely
harry her. She did not know, but her instinct gradually warned
her. She was tortured by the voice of Mr. Brunt. On it went,
jarring, harsh, full of hate, but so monotonous, it nearly drove
her mad: always the same set, harsh monotony. The man was become
a mechanism working on and on and on. But the personal man was
in subdued friction all the time. It was horrible--all
hate! Must she be like this? She could feel the ghastly
necessity. She must become the same--put away the personal
self, become an instrument, an abstraction, working upon a
certain material, the class, to achieve a set purpose of making
them know so much each day. And she could not submit. Yet
gradually she felt the invincible iron closing upon her. The sun
was being blocked out. Often when she went out at playtime and
saw a luminous blue sky with changing clouds, it seemed just a
fantasy, like a piece of painted scenery. Her heart was so black
and tangled in the teaching, her personal self was shut in
prison, abolished, she was subjugate to a bad, destructive will.
How then could the sky be shining? There was no sky, there was
no luminous atmosphere of out-of-doors. Only the inside of the
school was real--hard, concrete, real and vicious.

She would not yet, however, let school quite overcome her.
She always said. "It is not a permanency, it will come to an
end." She could always see herself beyond the place, see the
time when she had left it. On Sundays and on holidays, when she
was away at Cossethay or in the woods where the beech-leaves
were fallen, she could think of St. Philip's Church School, and
by an effort of will put it in the picture as a dirty little
low-squatting building that made a very tiny mound under the
sky, while the great beech-woods spread immense about her, and
the afternoon was spacious and wonderful. Moreover the children,
the scholars, they were insignificant little objects far away,
oh, far away. And what power had they over her free soul? A
fleeting thought of them, as she kicked her way through the
beech-leaves, and they were gon