ite well that each learned only one and directing his questioning
accordingly, Monsieur dreaming over the things he read to them,
repeating passages, wandering from his subject, making allusions here
and there--and all of them, she, at any rate, and Lilla--she knew,
often--in paradise. How rich and friendly and helpful they all seemed.

She began to wonder whether hers had been in some way a specially good
school. Things had mattered there. Somehow the girls had been made to
feel they mattered. She remembered even old Stroodie--the least attached
member of the staff--asking her suddenly, once, in the middle of a
music-lesson what she was going to do with her life and a day when the
artistic vice-principal--who was a connection by marriage of Holman
Hunt's and had met Ruskin, Miriam knew, several times--had gone from
girl to girl round the collected fifth and sixth forms asking them each
what they would best like to do in life. Miriam had answered at once
with a conviction born that moment that she wanted to "write a book." It
irritated her when she remembered during these reflections that she
had not been able to give to Fraulein Pfaff's public questioning any
intelligible account of the school. She might at least have told her
of the connection with Ruskin and Browning and Holman Hunt, whereas her
muddled replies had led Fraulein to decide that her school had been "a
kind of high school." She knew it had not been this. She felt there was
something questionable about a high school. She was beginning to think
that her school had been very good. Pater had seen to that--that was one
of the things he had steered and seen to. There had been a school they
might have gone to higher up the hill where one learned needlework even
in the "first class" as they called it instead of the sixth form as at
her school, and "Calisthenics" instead of drilling--and something called
elocution--where the girls were "finished." It was an expensive school.
Had the teachers there taught the girls... as if they had no minds?
Perhaps that school was more like the one she found herself in now? She
wondered and wondered. What was she going to do with her life after all
these years at the good school? She began bit by bit to understand her
agony on the day of leaving. It was there she belonged. She ought to go
back and go on.

One day she lay twisted and convulsed, face downwards on her bed at the
thought that she could never go back and begin. If on