handwriting on the board. He turned to the class.

"Pens down."

The children put down their pens and looked up.

"Fold arms."

They pushed back their books and folded arms.

Ursula, stuck among the back forms, could not extricate
herself.

"What is your composition about?" asked the
headmaster. Every hand shot up. "The ----" stuttered
some voice in its eagerness to answer.

"I wouldn't advise you to call out," said Mr. Harby. He would
have a pleasant voice, full and musical, but for the detestable
menace that always tailed in it. He stood unmoved, his eyes
twinkling under his bushy black eyebrows, watching the class.
There was something fascinating in him, as he stood, and again
she wanted to scream. She was all jarred, she did not know what
she felt.

"Well, Alice?" he said.

"The rabbit," piped a girl's voice.

"A very easy subject for Standard Five."

Ursula felt a slight shame of incompetence. She was exposed
before the class. And she was tormented by the contradictoriness
of everything. Mr. Harby stood so strong, and so male, with his
black brows and clear forehead, the heavy jaw, the big,
overhanging moustache: such a man, with strength and male power,
and a certain blind, native beauty. She might have liked him as
a man. And here he stood in some other capacity, bullying over
such a trifle as a boy's speaking out without permission. Yet he
was not a little, fussy man. He seemed to have some cruel,
stubborn, evil spirit, he was imprisoned in a task too small and
petty for him, which yet, in a servile acquiescence, he would
fulfil, because he had to earn his living. He had no finer
control over himself, only this blind, dogged, wholesale will.
He would keep the job going, since he must. And this job was to
make the children spell the word "caution" correctly, and put a
capital letter after a full-stop. So at this he hammered with
his suppressed hatred, always suppressing himself, till he was
beside himself. Ursula suffered, bitterly as he stood, short and
handsome and powerful, teaching her class. It seemed such a
miserable thing for him to be doing. He had a decent, powerful,
rude soul. What did he care about the composition on "The
Rabbit"? Yet his will kept him there before the class, threshing
the trivial subject. It was habit with him now, to be so little
and vulgar, out of place. She saw the shamefulness of his
position, felt the fettered wickedness in him which would blaze
out into evil r