Page:Angela Brazil--the leader of the lower school.djvu/38

32 swimming baths, Oxford Extension lectures, high-class concerts, art exhibitions, and other educational privileges not always to be met with in a provincial town. On the other hand, the country was within easy reach. Ten minutes' walk led on to comparatively rural roads, and within half an hour you could find yourself beginning to climb the fells, with a long stretch of heather for a prospect, and the pure moorland air filling your lungs.

Miss Poppleton, the Principal of the school, irreverently nicknamed "Poppie" by her pupils, was a double B.A., for she had taken her degree in both classics and mathematics. She was a rather small, determined little lady, with a bright complexion, sharp, short-sighted, greenish-grey eyes, which peered at the world through a pair of round rimless spectacles, but seemed nevertheless to see everything ("too much", the habitual sinners affirmed!), what the girls called "an enquiring nose", grey hair brushed back quite straight from a square, "brainy"-looking forehead, and a mouth that had a habit of pursing and unpursing itself very rapidly when its owner was at all irritated or disturbed in mind. She was a good organizer, a strict disciplinarian, and a clever teacher—everything that is admirable, in fact, in a headmistress, from the scholastic point of view; and her vigorous, intellectual, capable personality always made an excellent impression upon parents and guardians. By the girls themselves she was regarded in a less favourable light: the very qualities which gave her success as a Principal caused her to seem distant and