cross the way, sitting
in their cool creased black-and-white check cotton dresses. They still
kept to their hard white collars and cuffs. As tea went on Miriam
found her eyes drawn back and back again to these newly unpacked
camphor-scented dresses... and when conversation broke after moments
of stillness... shadowy foliage... the still hot garden... the sunbaked
wooden room beyond the sunny saal, the light pouring through three rooms
and bright along the table... it was to the Martins' check dresses that
she glanced.

It was intensely hot, but the strain had gone out of the day; the
feeling of just bearing up against the heat and getting through the day
had gone; they all sat round... which was which?... Miriam met eye after
eye--how beautiful they all were looking out from faces and meeting
hers--and her eyes came back unembarrassed to her cup, her solid
butterbrot and the sunlit angle of the garden wall and the bit of tree
just over Fraulein Pfaff's shoulder. She tried to meet Mademoiselle's
eyes, she felt sure their eyes could meet. She wondered intensely what
was in Elsa's mind behind her faint hard blue dress. She wanted to hear
Mademoiselle's voice; Mademoiselle was almost invisible in her corner
near the door, the new housekeeper was sitting at her side very upright
and close to the table. Once or twice she felt Fraulein's look; she
sustained it, and glowed happily under it without meeting it; she
referred back contentedly to it after hearing herself laugh out once
just as she would do at home; once or twice she forgot for a moment
where she was. The way the light shone on the housekeeper's hair,
bright brown and plastered flatly down on either side of her bright
white-and-crimson face, and the curves of her chocolate and white
striped cotton bodice, reminded her sharply of something she had seen
once, something that had charmed her... it was in the hair against the
hard white of the forehead and the flat broad cheeks with the hard,
clear crimson colouring nearly covering them... something in the way
she sat, standing out against the others.... Judy on her left hand with
almost the same colouring looked small and gentle and refined.

6

Tea was over. Fraulein decided against a walk and they all trooped into
the saal. No programme was suggested; they all sat about unoccupied.
There was no centre; Fraulein Pfaff was one of them. The little group
near her in the shady half of the sunlit summer-house was as