y jacket.... "Perhaps I won't have
any more fitted bodices," she mused and was back for a moment in the
stale little sitting-room of the Barnes dressmaker. She remembered
deeply breathing in the odour of fabrics and dust and dankness and
cracking her newly fitted lining at the pinholes and saying, "It is too
tight there"--crack-crack. "I can't go like that"...

"But you never want to go like that, my dear child," old Miss Ottridge
had laughed, readjusting the pins; "just breathe in your ordinary
way--there, see? That's right."

Perhaps Lilla's mother was right about blouses... perhaps they were
"slommucky." She remembered phrases she had heard about people's
figures... "falling abroad"... "the middle-aged sprawl"... that would
come early to her as she was so old and worried... perhaps that was why
one had to wear boned bodices... and never breathe in gulps of air like
this?... It was as if all the worry were being taken out of her temples.
She felt her eyes grow strong and clear; a coolness flowed through
her--obstructed only where she felt the heavy pad of hair pinned to the
back of her head, the line of her hat, the hot line of compression round
her waist and the confinement of her inflexible boots.

They were approaching the Georgstrasse with its long-vistaed width and
its shops and cafes and pedestrians. An officer in pale blue Prussian
uniform passed by flashing a single hard preoccupied glance at each
of them in turn. His eyes seemed to Miriam like opaque blue glass.
She could not remember such eyes in England. They began to walk more
quickly. Miriam listened abstractedly to Minna's anticipations of three
days at a friend's house when she would visit her parents at the end
of the week. Minna's parents, her far-away home on the outskirts of
a little town, its garden, their little carriage, the spring, the
beautiful country seemed unreal and her efforts to respond and be
interested felt like a sort of treachery to her present bliss....
Everybody, even docile Minna, always seemed to want to talk about
something else....

Suddenly she was aware that Minna was asking her whether, if it was
decided that she should leave school at the end of the term, she,
Miriam, would come and live with her.

Miriam beamed incredulously. Minna, crimson-faced, with her eyes on the
pavement and hurrying along explained that she was alone at home,
that she had never made friends--her mother always wanted her to make
friends--but she