ssenberger or presiding over his lessons when he came. Miriam
events, would watch her disappear unconcernedly through the folding
doors, every time with fresh wonder. She did not want to take her place,
though it would have meant listening to Herr Bossenberger's teaching and
a quiet alcove of freedom from the apprehensive uncertainty that hung
over so many of her hours. It seemed to her odd, not quite the thing, to
have a third person in the room at a music lesson. She tried to imagine
a lesson being given to herself under these conditions. The thought wa
complete insensibility to music, her eyes bent on her work, the quick
movements of her small, thin hands, the darting gleam of her thimble,
the dry way she had of clearing her throat, a gesture that was an
accentuation of the slightly metallic quality of her voice, and
expressed, for Miriam, in sound, that curious sense of circumspect
frugality she was growing to realise as characteristic of Mademoiselle's
face in repose.

The saal doors closed, the little door leading into the hall became the
centre of Miriam's attention. Before long, sometimes at the end of
ten minutes, this door would open and the day become eventful. She had
already taken Clara, with Emma, to make a third, three times to her
masseuse, sitting for half an hour in a room above a chemist's shop
so stuffy beyond anything in her experience that she had carried away
nothing but the sense of its closely-interwoven odours, a dim picture
of Clara in a saffron-coloured wrapper and the shocked impression of
the resounding thwackings undergone by her. Emma was paying a series
of visits to the dentist and might appear at the schoolroom door with
frightened eyes, holding it open--"Hendchen! Ich muss zum Zahnarzt."
Miriam dreaded these excursions. The first time Miriam had accompanied
her Emma had had "gas." Miriam, assailed by a loud scream followed
by the peremptory voices of two white-coated, fiercely moustached
operators, one of whom seemed to be holding Emma in the chair, had
started from her sofa in the background. "Brutes!" she had declared and
reached the chair-side voluble in unintelligible German to find Emma
serenely emerging from unconsciousness. Once she had taken Gertrude to
the dentist--another dentist, an elderly man, practising in a frock-coat
in a heavily-furnished room with high sash windows, the lower sashes
filled with stained glass. There had been a driving March wind and
Gertrude with a sha