the floor.

"Get up," she said. The thing writhed away from her. She took
a step forward. She had realized the presence of the headmaster
for one second, and then she was oblivious of it again.

"Get up," she said. And with a little dart the boy was on his
feet. His yelling dropped to a mad blubber. He had been in a
frenzy.

"Go and stand by the radiator," she said.

As if mechanically, blubbering, he went.

The headmaster stood robbed of movement or speech. His face
was yellow, his hands twitched convulsively. But Ursula stood
stiff not far from him. Nothing could touch her now: she was
beyond Mr. Harby. She was as if violated to death.

The headmaster muttered something, turned, and went down the
room, whence, from the far end, he was heard roaring in a mad
rage at his own class.

The boy blubbered wildly by the radiator. Ursula looked at
the class. There were fifty pale, still faces watching her, a
hundred round eyes fixed on her in an attentive, expressionless
stare.

"Give out the history readers," she said to the monitors.

There was dead silence. As she stood there, she could hear
again the ticking of the clock, and the chock of piles of books
taken out of the low cupboard. Then came the faint flap of books
on the desks. The children passed in silence, their hands
working in unison. They were no longer a pack, but each one
separated into a silent, closed thing.

"Take page 125, and read that chapter," said Ursula.

There was a click of many books opened. The children found
the page, and bent their heads obediently to read. And they
read, mechanically.

Ursula, who was trembling violently, went and sat in her high
chair. The blubbering of the boy continued. The strident voice
of Mr. Brunt, the roar of Mr. Harby, came muffled through the
glass partition. And now and then a pair of eyes rose from the
reading-book, rested on her a moment, watchful, as if
calculating impersonally, then sank again.

She sat still without moving, her eyes watching the class,
unseeing. She was quite still, and weak. She felt that she could
not raise her hand from the desk. If she sat there for ever, she
felt she could not move again, nor utter a command. It was a
quarter-past four. She almost dreaded the closing of the school,
when she would be alone.

The class began to recover its ease, the tension relaxed.
Williams was still crying. Mr. Brunt was giving orders for the
closing of the lesson. Ursula got down.

"T