would have houses and things they
could do and understand, always.... How they must want to begin, she
mused.... What a prison school must seem.

She thought of their comfortable German homes, of ruling and shopping
and directing and being looked up to.... German husbands.

That thought she shirked. Emma in particular she could not contemplate
in relation to a German husband.

In any case one day these girls would be middle-aged... as Clara looked
now... they would look like the German women on the boulevards and in
the shops.

In the end she ceased to wonder that the German masters dealt out their
wares to these girls so superciliously.

And yet... German music, a line of German poetry, a sudden light on
Clara's face....

6

There was one other teacher, a Swiss and some sort of minister she
supposed as everyone called him the Herr Pastor. She wondered whether
he was in any sense the spiritual adviser of the school and regarded
him with provisional suspicion. She had seen him once, sitting short
and very black and white at the head of the schoolroom table. His black
beard and dark eyes as he sat with his back to the window made his face
gleam like a mask. He had spoken very rapidly as he told the girls the
life-story of some poet.

7

The time that was not taken up by the masters and the regular succession
of rich and savoury meals--wastefully plentiful they seemed to
Miriam--was filled in by Fraulein Pfaff with occupations devised
apparently from hour to hour. On a master's morning the girls collected
in the schoolroom one by one as they finished their bed-making and
dusting. On other days the time immediately after breakfast was full of
uncertainty and surmise. Judging from the interchange between the four
first-floor bedrooms whose doors were always open during this bustling
interval, Miriam, listening apprehensively as she did her share of work
on the top floor, gathered that the lack of any planned programme was
a standing annoyance to the English girls. Millie, still imperfectly
acclimatised, carrying out her duties in a large bibbed apron, was
plaintive about it in her conscientious German nearly every morning. The
Martins, when the sense of Fraulein as providence was strong upon them
made their beds vindictively, rapping out sarcasms to be alternately
mocked and giggled at by Jimmie who was generally heard, as the gusts
subsided, dispensing the comforting assurance that it wouldn't last f