"Oh, dear!" wailed the old lady, "you must not do this for me, lass; you're heaping coals of fire on my 'ead, for, as Mrs. Wells often said to me, 'Don't be so set on 'Orace; remember, you have a girl too.' I was always set on the boys, and not on the girls; women's life is a poor game, and when I heard of them 'eathen 'Indus who kill the girl babies, I thought it a very sensible thing too—better than letting them grow up to slave for a pittance. But it is you now who are the faithful one," and she drew Esther's face down to hers and kissed her fondly.
Tears rose in the daughter's eyes; she seemed to remember with a sense of loss that her mother had never kissed her like that since she was a little child, before Horace was born.
"TOO OLD AT FORTY"
I had no place to flee unto; and no man careth for my soul.
Miss Allison sat at her desk in the class-room, where she had sat for over twenty years, and gazed dreamily out of the window into the courtyard below, where the girls of the —— High School were at play. In her hand she held a letter, which had brought the white, rigid look to her face, like that of a soldier who has received his death-wound. Perhaps she ought to have been prepared for the shock; the system of "too old at forty" has long been in working order in girls' schools, possibilities had been freely discussed in the mistresses' room; but, nevertheless, the blow had struck her dumb and senseless. The note was very polite—"owing to changes on the staff her valuable services would be no longer required after the summer vacation"—but Miss Allison had seen enough of the inner workings of High Schools to know that changes on the staff meant that the old and incompetent were to be crushed out to make room for the young and fresh. Miss Allison was not incompetent—her worst enemy could not accuse her of that—but she was getting just a little tired, just a little irritable; above all, her forty-second birthday had come and gone. Teaching is well known to affect the nerves, and in Miss Allison's case nervous exhaustion caused her tongue to run away with her; her sharp speeches to the idlers of her form were reported at home—losing nothing in the telling—and duly retailed by captious parents to the head mistress; the constant complaints were becoming a nuisance. Moreover, a young mistress, who would take interest in the sports and could bowl round-arm, was badly wanted on the staff. Miss Allison belonged to an older generation, when athletics were not a sine qua non; she had never been a cricketer, at hockey her pupils easily outran her, and she had lost her nerve for high-diving—altogether, she had lived past her age. The queer part was, it had all taken such a little time; it seemed only yesterday that she had come to the school, the youngest on the staff, and now she was the oldest there, far older than the young girl from Girton who reigned as head. And yet life was not nearly over yet; Miss Allison remembered with dismay that women went on living for fifty, sixty, seventy, and even eighty and ninety years—it might be that half the journey still lay before her.
She made a rapid calculation in her brain of her little capital in the savings-bank, which yielded her (after the income-tax had been recovered) an annual sum of £10 13s. 9d. Though too old to teach, she was too young to buy much of an annuity with the capital, and she knew the state of the labour market too well to cherish any illusions as to the possibility of obtaining work. Perhaps she ought to have saved more, but for some years she had her invalid mother mainly dependent upon her, and illness runs away with money; she grudged nothing to the dead, but she remembered almost with shame the amount she had spent in holiday tours.
Her eyes rested with a sense of coming loss on the crowd in the playground, a kaleidoscopic scene of flying legs and whirling draperies, the sun shining on bright frocks and on the loose locks of gold and auburn till the dreary courtyard seemed to blossom like a flower-garden. How she had loved all these girls, toiled and slaved for them, rejoiced in their success and mourned for their disappointments; but the children of the Higher Education, unlike Saturn, devour the mothers of the movement, and suddenly these fair young girls had turned into rivals and enemies, beating her down in the dust with cricket bats and hockey sticks. An hour of bitter atheism fell upon Miss Allison; all her life had been spent in serving "the cause," the Higher Education of Women had been her creed, but now in middle life it had failed and she was left helpless and superfluous as the poor women of an earlier generation, who hung so forlornly round the neck of their nearest male relation.
A dry sob half choked her, as she rose mechanically in obedience to the bell to take her class in geometry.