her too warm and
bumped against her as she hurried along--the little fur pelerine which
redeemed its plainness tickled her neck and she felt the outline of her
stiff hat like a board against her uneasy forehead. Her inflexible boots
soon tired her.... But these things she could have endured. They
were not the main source of her trouble. She could have renounced the
delights all round her, made terms with the discomforts and looked for
alleviations. But it was during these walks that she began to perceive
that she was making, in a way she had not at all anticipated, a complete
failure of her role of English teacher. The three weeks' haphazard
curriculum had brought only one repetition of her English lesson in the
smaller schoolroom; and excepting at meals, when whatever conversation
there was was general and polyglot, she was never, in the house, alone
with her German pupils. The cessation of the fixed readings arranged
with her that first day by Fraulein Pfaff did not, in face of the
general absence of method, at all disturb her. Mademoiselle's classes
had, she discovered, except for the weekly mending, long since lapsed
altogether. These walks, she soon realised, were supposed to be her
and her pupils' opportunity. No doubt Fraulein Pfaff believed that they
represented so many hours of English conversation--and they did not. It
was cheating, pure and simple. She thought of fee-paying parents, of the
probable prospectus. "French and English governesses."

14

Her growing conviction and the distress of it were confirmed each week
by a spectacle she could not escape and was rapidly growing to hate.
Just in front of her and considerably behind the flying van, her full
wincey skirt billowing out beneath what seemed to Miriam a dreadfully
thin little close-fitting stockinette jacket, trotted Mademoiselle--one
hand to the plain brim of her large French hat, and obviously
conversational with either Minna and Elsa or Clara and Emma on either
side of her. Generally it was Minna and Elsa, Minna brisk and trim and
decorous as to her neat plaid skirt, however hurried, and Elsa showing
her distress by the frequent twisting of one or other of her ankles
which looked, to Miriam, like sticks above her high-heeled shoes.
Mademoiselle's broad hat-brim flapped as her head turned from one
companion to the other. Sometimes Miriam caught the mocking tinkle of
her laughter. That all three were interested, too, Miriam gathered from
th