“Lauter Unsinn!” announced Clara.
“We’ve all got to do our hair in clash … clashishsher Knoten, Hendy, all of us,” said Jimmie judicially, sitting forward with her plump hands clasped on the table. Her pinnacle of hair looked exactly as usual.
“Oh, really.” Miriam tried to make a picture of a classic knot in her mind.
“If one have classic head one can have classic knot,” scolded Clara.
“Who have classic head?”
“How many classic head in the school of Waldstraße?”
Elsa gave a little neighing laugh. “Klassisch head, klassisch Knote.”
“That is true what you say, Clarah.”
The table paused.
“Dîtes-moi—qu’est-ce-que ce terrible classique notte? Dîtes!”
No one seemed prepared to answer Mademoiselle’s challenge.
Miriam’s mind groped … classic—Greece and Rome—Greek knot. … Grecian key … a Grecian key pattern on the dresses for the sixth form tableau—reading Ruskin … the strip of glass all along the window space on the floor in the large room—edged with mosses and grass—the mirror of Venus. …
“Eh bien? Eh bien!”
… Only the eldest pretty girls … all on their hands and knees looking into the mirror. …
“Klassische Form—griechisch,” explained Clara.
“Like a statue, Mademoiselle.”
“Comment! Une statue! Je dois arranger mes cheveux comme une statue? Oh, ciel!” mocked Mademoiselle, collapsing into tinkles of her sprite laughter. … “Oh-là-là! Et quelle statue par exemple?” she trilled, with ironic eyebrows, “la statue de votre Kaisère Wilhelm der Große peut-être?”
The Martins’ guffaws led the laughter.
“Mademoisellekin with her hair done like the Kaiser Wilhelm,” pealed Jimmie.
Only Clara remained grave in wrath.
“Einfach,” she quoted bitterly, “Simple—says Lily, so 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.
“Leely, Leely, Leely Pfaff,” muttered Clara as she helped, “so einfach und niedlich,” she mimicked, “ach was! Schwärmerei—das find’ ich abscheulich! I find it disgusting!”
So that was it. It was the new girl. Lily, was Fräulein 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 Fräulein 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 Fräulein 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 Fräulein 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.
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. Today 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 of the room looked now and again gloomily out into the garden. Miriam did not want to write letters. She sat, pen in hand, and notepaper in front of her, feeling that she loved the atmosphere of these Saturday afternoons. This was her second. She had been in the school a fortnight—the first Saturday she had spent writing to her mother—a long letter for everyone to read, full of first impressions and enclosing a slangy almost affectionate little note for Harriett. In her general letter she had said, “If you want to think of something jolly, think of me, here.” She had hesitated over that sentence when she considered mealtimes, especially the midday meal, but on the whole she had decided to let it stand—this afternoon she felt it was truer. She was beginning to belong to the house—she did not want to write letters—but just to sit revelling in the sense of this room full of quietly occupied girls—in the first hours of the weekly holiday. She thought of strange Ulrica somewhere upstairs and felt quite one of the old gang. “Ages” she had known all these girls. She was not afraid of them at all. She would not be afraid of them any more. Emma Bergmann across the table raised a careworn face from her two lines of large neat lettering and caught her eye. She put up her hands on either side of her mouth as if for shouting.
“Hendchen,” she articulated silently, in her curious lipless way, “mein liebes, liebes, Hendchen.”
Miriam smiled timidly and sternly began fumbling at her week’s letters—one from Eve, full of congratulations and recommendations—“Keep up your music, my dear,” said the conclusion, “and don’t mind that little German girl being fond of you. It is impossible to be too
