"Just two--that's my experience. The girl from whom you get work by telling her you are sure she can do it--and the girl from whom you get work by telling her you are sure she can't. You'll soon find out which I told Clare Hartill. And now, understand this, Henrietta. There are to be no dissensions. I want Clare Hartill to stay. If she gets engrossed in the work, she will. She won't interfere with you, you'll find. She's too lazy. Get on with her if you can."
But Henrietta had not got on with her, had resented fiercely Miss Marsham's preferential treatment of the new-comer. That Miss Marsham was obviously wise in her generation did not appease her _amour propre_. She knew that where she had failed, Clare had been uncannily successful. Yet Clare was not aggressively efficient: indeed it was a grievance that she was so apparently casual, so gracefully indifferent. But, as if it were a matter of course, she did whatever she set out to do so much better, so much more graphically than it had ever been done before, that inevitably she attracted disciples. But Henrietta's grievance went deeper. She denied her any vestige of personal charm, and at the same time insisted fiercely that she was an unscrupulous woman, in that she used her personal charm to accomplish her aims: her aims, in Henrietta's eyes, being the ousting of the secretary from her position of trust and possible succession to the headship. Henrietta did not realise that it was herself, far more than Clare, who was jeopardising that position. Though there was no system of prefecture among the staff, she had come to consider herself responsible for the junior mistresses, encouraging them to bring complaints to her, rather than to the head of the school. Old Miss Marsham, little as she liked relaxing her hold on the reins, dreaded, as old age must, the tussle that would inevitably follow any insistence on her prerogatives, and had acquiesced; yet with reservations. Had one of the younger mistresses rebelled and carried her grievance to the higher court, Miss Vigers' eyes might have been opened; but as yet no one had challenged her self-assumed supremacy. Clare, who might have done so, cared little who supervised the boarders or was supreme in the matter of time-table and commissariat. Her interest lay in the actual work, in the characters and possibilities of the workers. There she brooked no interference, and Henrietta attempted little, for when she did she was neatly and completely routed.