“That’s fatal! I tried it myself one summer. Went with a family to the seaside, and was expected to play games with the children all day long, and coach them in the evening. I began the term tired out, and nearly collapsed before the end. Teaching is nerve-racking work, and if you don’t get a good spell off, it’s as bad for the pupils as yourself. You snap their heads off for the smallest trifle. Besides, it’s folly to wear oneself out any sooner than one need. It’s bad enough to think of the time when one has to retire. That’s the nightmare which haunts us more and more every year.”
“Don’t you think when the time comes you will be glad to rest?” asked innocent Claire, whereupon Miss Rhodes glared at her with indignant eyes.
“We should be glad to rest, no doubt, but we don’t exactly appreciate the prospect of resting in the workhouse, and it’s difficult to see where else some of us are to go! There is no pension for High School-mistresses, and we are bound to retire at fifty-five—if we can manage to stick it out so long. Fifty-five seems a long way off to you—not quite so long to me; when you reach forty it becomes to feel quite near. Women are horribly long-lived, so the probability is that we’ll live on to eighty or more. Twenty-five years after leaving off work, and—where is the money to come from to keep us? That’s the question which haunts us all when we look into our bank-books and find that, with all our pains, we have only been able to save at the utmost two or three hundred pounds.”
Claire looked scared, but she recovered her composure with a swiftness which her companion had no difficulty in understanding. She pounced upon her with lightning swiftness.
“Ah, you think you’ll get married, and escape that way! We all do when we’re new, and pretty, and ignorant of the life. But it’s fifty to one, my dear, that you won’t? You won’t meet many men, for one thing; and if you do, they don’t like school-mistresses.”
“Doesn’t that depend a good deal on the kind of school-mistress?”
“Absolutely; but after a few years we are all more or less alike. We don’t begin by being dowdy and angular, and dogmatic and prudish; we begin by being pretty and cheerful like you. I used to change my blouse every evening, and put on silk stockings.”
“Don’t you now?”
“I do not! Why should I, to sit over a lodging-house table correcting exercises till ten o’clock? It’s not worth the trouble. Besides, I’m too tired, and it wears out another blouse.”
Claire’s attention was diverted from clothes by the shock of the reference to evening work. She had looked forward to coming home to read an interesting book, or be lazy in whatever fashion appealed to her most, and the corrections of exercises seemed of all things the most dull.