d and important. He was not
listening. He was being an English gentleman, "emerging" from the Dutch
railway station.

"Sunlight _Zeep_," she shouted. "_Zeep_, Pater!"

He glanced down at her and smiled condescendingly.

"Ah, yes," he admitted with a laugh.

There were Dutch faces for Miriam--men, women and children coming
towards her with sturdy gait.

"They're talking Dutch! They're all talking _Dutch!_"

The foreign voices, the echoes in the little narrow street, the flat
waterside effect of the sounds, the bright clearness she had read of,
brought tears to her eyes.

"The others _must_ come here," she told herself, pitying them all.

They had an English breakfast at the Victoria Hotel and went out and
hurried about the little streets. They bought cigars and rode through
the town on a little tramway. Presently they were in a train watching
the Dutch landscape go by. One level stretch succeeded another. Miriam
wanted to go out alone under the grey sky and walk over the flat fields
shut in by poplars.

She looked at the dykes and the windmills with indifferent eyes, but her
desire for the flat meadows grew.

Late at night, seated wide-awake opposite her sleeping companion,
rushing towards the German city, she began to think.

4

It was a fool's errand.... To undertake to go to the German school and
teach... to be going there... with nothing to give. The moment would
come when there would be a class sitting round a table waiting for
her to speak. She imagined one of the rooms at the old school, full of
scornful girls.... How was English taught? How did you begin? English
grammar... in German? Her heart beat in her throat. She had never
thought of that... the rules of English grammar? Parsing and
analysis.... Anglo-Saxon prefixes and suffixes ... gerundial
infinitive.... It was too late to look anything up. Perhaps there
would be a class to-morrow.... The German lessons at school had been
dreadfully good.... Fraulein's grave face... her perfect knowledge of
every rule... her clear explanations in English ... her examples.... All
these things were there, in English grammar.... And she had undertaken
to teach them and could not even speak German.

Monsieur... had talked French all the time... dictees... lectures... Le
Conscrit... Waterloo... La Maison Deserte... his careful voice reading
on and on... until the room disappeared.. .. She must do that for her
German girls. Read English to them and make t