arriett
had giggled. She would not even be able afterwards to ask her what it
was.

3

Sitting on this third Sunday morning in the dim Schloss Kirche--the
Waldstrasse pew was in one of its darkest spaces and immediately under
the shadow of a deeply overhanging gallery--Miriam understood poor
Emma's confessed hysteria over the abruptly alternating kneelings and
standings, risings and sittings of an Anglican congregation. Here, there
was no need to be on the watch for the next move. The service droned
quietly and slowly on. Miriam paid no heed to it. She sat in the
comforting darkness. The unobserving Germans were all round her, the
English girls tailed away invisibly into the distant obscurity. Fraulein
Pfaff was not there, nor Mademoiselle. She was alone with the school.
She felt safe for a while and derived solace from the reflection that
there would always be church. If she were a governess all her life there
would be church. There was a little sting of guilt in the thought.
It would be practising deception.... To despise it all, to hate
the minister and the choir and the congregation and yet to
come--running--she could imagine herself all her life running, at least
in her mind, weekly to some church--working her fingers into their
gloves and pretending to take everything for granted and to be just like
everybody else and really thinking only of getting into a quiet pew
and ceasing to pretend. It was wrong to use church like that. She was
wrong--all wrong. It couldn't be helped. Who was there who could help
her? She imagined herself going to a clergyman and saying she was bad
and wanted to be good--even crying. He would be kind and would pray and
smile--and she would be told to listen to sermons in the right spirit.
She could never do that.... There she felt she was on solid ground.
Listening to sermons was wrong... people ought to refuse to be preached
at by these men. Trying to listen to them made her more furious than
anything she could think of, more base in submitting... those men's
sermons were worse than women's smiles... just as insincere at any
rate... and you could get away from the smiles, make it plain you did
not agree and that things were not simple and settled... but you could
not stop a sermon. It was so unfair. The service might be lovely, if you
did not listen to the words; and then the man got up and went on and on
from unsound premises until your brain was sick... droning on and on and
get