it was true--she could not remember ever having felt a schoolgirl...
or being "talked down" to... dear Stroodie, the music-master, and
Monsieur--old whitehaired Monsieur, dearest of all, she could hear
his gentle voice pleading with them on behalf of his treasures...
the drilling-master with his keen, friendly blue eye... the briefless
barrister who had taught them arithmetic in a baritone voice, laughing
all the time but really wanting them to get on.

What was it she missed? Was it that her old teachers were "gentlemen"
and these Germans were not? She pondered over this and came to the
conclusion that the whole attitude of the Englishman and of Monsieur,
her one Frenchman, towards her sex was different from that of these
Germans. It occurred to her once in a flash during these puzzled musings
that the lessons she had had at school would not have been given more
zestfully, more as if it were worth while, had she and her schoolfellows
been boys. Here she could not feel that. The teaching was grave enough.
The masters felt the importance of what they taught... she felt that
they were formal, reverently formal, "pompous" she called it, towards
the facts that they flung out down the long schoolroom table, but that
the relationship of their pupils to these facts seemed a matter of less
indifference to them.

3

She began to recognise now with a glow of gratitude that her own
teachers, those who were enthusiastic about their subjects--the albino,
her dear Monsieur with his classic French prose, a young woman who had
taught them logic and the beginning of psychology--that strange, new
subject--were at least as enthusiastic about getting her and her mates
awake and into relationship with something. They cared somehow.

She recalled the albino, his face and voice generally separated from his
class by a book held vertically, close to his left eye, while he blocked
the right eye with his free hand--his faintly wheezy tones bleating
triumphantly out at the end of a passage from "The Ring and the Book,"
as he lowered his volume and bent beaming towards them all, his right
eye still blocked, for response. Miss Donne, her skimpy skirt powdered
with chalk, explaining a syllogism from the blackboard, turning quietly
to them, her face all aglow, her chalky hands gently pressed together,
"Do you _see?_ Does anyone _see?"_ Monsieur, spoiling them, sharpening
their pencils, letting them cheat over their pages of rules, knowing
qu