Sister Wolstan had no real quarrel with her lot. Long enough ago she had renounced the world (although one still had to live in it), the flesh (although one still had to eat, drink, sleep and wash), and the devil (although Sister Wolstan sometimes thought that it must be easier to oust him from a reformatory than from a convent) and she was prepared to be humble and meek, offering her meekness and her humility (and the rheumatism that had begun to trouble her) upon the same altar on which so many years ago she had laid her vows of poverty and chastity and her vow of obedience to her superiors.
   What she did mind, though she had never consciously formulated the thought, let alone voiced it, was having to be subservient for eight hours a day to Sister Mary Hilary. Some­how, she felt, it was unsuitable that she should find herself in this position. For one thing, Sister Hilary was a convert to the Faith and had not entered religion until she was turned thirty. In her unregenerate days she had led protest marches, obstructed the police and had stood out for women’s rights in a militant, aggressive, troublemaking manner that had resulted in a most disagreeable blaze of newspaper publicity and a threat of dismissal from her teaching post. Unfortunately, (although Sister Wolstan always did her best to suppress this uncharitable adverb), once she had sown her wild oats and settled down, Sister Hilary had turned out to be first class at her job and after not more than six years in religion had been appointed headmistress of the convent school and, during the eight years of her reign, had almost trebled the numbers and had achieved that most desirable goal for a fee‑paying institution, a waiting list of would-be entrants. As the convent depended upon the school for a considerable portion of its income, the appointment of Sister Mary Hilary appeared to be fully justified.
   Sister Wolstan had another cause for feeling aggrieved, though she did her best to suppress it. In the old days, that is to say before Sister Hilary’s appointment as headmistress, Sister Wolstan had been sent for training to a Commercial College where she learned typing, shorthand and book­keeping so that the school could offer an elementary course called Commercial Studies. Sister Wolstan, returning to the school with her hardly-acquired certificates, had actually taught these subjects and felt great satisfaction in doing so.
   With the advent of the new regime eight years previously, however, the Commercial Studies course had been dropped, and, with it, Sister Wolstan’s status in the school had declined.
   “The girls who want that sort of thing would do far better at a polytechnic,” said Sister Hilary. “The merely basic stuff they learn here won’t be to them the least bit of good in getting the sort of job they want. It’s a something and a noth­ing, Sister, as I’m sure you will be the first to admit. I want to run the school on academic and cultural lines. If our kind of education depends upon anything, it depends upon snob-value, and you don’t get that by teaching elementary shorthand and the rudiments of how to operate a typewriter.”
   So the Commercial Studies had gone down the drain and Sister Wolstan had gone from a well-ordered classroom to the secretary’s poky little office next to the school front door. There was another thing, too, that Sister Wolstan did not like. Before Sister Hilary took over the reins, the Community had em­ployed a sufficient number of resident teachers to work a small boarding establishment, and now, in addition to Sister Wolstan and Sisters Romuald, Fabian, Honorius, Elphege and Leo, there were still secular teachers on the staff, though they were no longer resident. There was Nancy Webb, who took physical education and coached the games; there was Petrella Grey, the dance and drama instructress; and there was Frances Fennell, the remedials teacher, who took on what were known in the staffroom as “the backwards” and to themselves and their par­ents as “the special advantage group”.
  These women seculars might all have been bearable, though, in her secret heart, Sister Wolstan despised seculars as a spoilt, undisciplined, self-seeking, lax majority, but the women secular teachers formed only the tip of the iceberg, so to speak. What Sister Wolstan found hard to accept was the presence of men on the teaching staff. True, like the women, they were visitors only, coming each morning and returning home at night; true, they were of the same sex as Father MacNicol, the parish priest and the nuns’ confessor; true, they seemed gentlemanly and unobtrusive enough, but Sister Wolstan did not trust them. In her opinion they had no place in the school and should have taken no part in educating growing girls.