simple!"

"Simple--simpler--simplicissimusko!"

"I make no change, not at all," smiled Minna from behind her nose.
"For this Ulrica it is quite something other.... She has yes truly so
charming a little head."

She spoke quietly and unenviously.

"I too, indeed. Lily may go and play the flute."

"Brave girls," said Gertrude, getting up. "Come on, Kinder, clearing
time. You'll excuse us, Miss Henderson? There's your pudding in the
lift. Do you mind having your coffee _mit?_"

The girls began to clear up.

_"Leelly, Leely,_ Leely Pfaff," muttered Clara as she helped, "so
einfach und niedlich," she mimicked, "ach _was!_ Schwarmerei--das find'
ich abscheulich! I find it disgusting!"

So that was it. It was the new girl. Lily, was Fraulein Pfaff. So the
new girl wore her hair in a classic knot. How lovely. Without her hat
she had "a charming little head," Minna had said. And that face. Minna
had seen how lovely she was and had not minded. Clara was jealous. Her
head with a classic knot and no fringe, her worn-looking sallow face....
She would look like a "prisoner at the bar" in some newspaper. How
they hated Fraulein Pfaff. The Germans at least. Fancy calling her
Lily--Miriam did not like it, she had known at once. None of the
teachers at school had been called by their Christian names--there had
been old Quagmire, the Elfkin, and dear Donnikin, Stroodie, and good old
Kingie and all of them--but no Christian names. Oh yes--Sally--so there
had--Sally--but then Sally was--couldn't have been anything else--never
could have held a position of any sort. They ought not to call Fraulein
Pfaff that. It was, somehow, nasty. Did the English girls do it? Ought
she to have said anything? Mademoiselle did not seem at all shocked.
Where was Fraulein Pfaff all this time? Perhaps somewhere hidden away,
in her rooms, being "done" by Frau Krause. Fancy telling them all to
alter the way they did their hair.

21

Everyone was writing Saturday letters--Mademoiselle and the Germans with
compressed lips and fine careful evenly moving pen-points; the English
scrawling and scraping and dashing, their pens at all angles and
careless, eager faces. An almost unbroken silence seemed the order
of the earlier part of a Saturday afternoon. To-day the room was very
still, save for the slight movements of the writers. At intervals
nothing was to be heard but the little chorus of pens. Clara, still
smouldering, sitting at the window end o