What was it she missed? Was it that her old teachers were “gentlemen” and these Germans were not? She pondered over this and came to the conclusion that the whole attitude of the Englishman and of Monsieur, her one Frenchman, towards her sex was different from that of these Germans. It occurred to her once in a flash during these puzzled musings that the lessons she had had at school would not have been given more zestfully, more as if it were worthwhile, had she and her schoolfellows been boys. Here she could not feel that. The teaching was grave enough. The masters felt the importance of what they taught … she felt that they were formal, reverently formal, “pompous” she called it, towards the facts that they flung out down the long schoolroom table, but that the relationship of their pupils to these facts seemed a matter of less than indifference to them.
She began to recognise now with a glow of gratitude that her own teachers, those who were enthusiastic about their subjects—the albino, her dear Monsieur with his classic French prose, a young woman who had taught them logic and the beginning of psychology—that strange, new subject—were at least as enthusiastic about getting her and her mates awake and into relationship with something. They cared somehow.
She recalled the albino, his face and voice generally separated from his class by a book held vertically, close to his left eye, while he blocked the right eye with his free hand—his faintly wheezy tones bleating triumphantly out at the end of a passage from The Ring and the Book, as he lowered his volume and bent beaming towards them all, his right eye still blocked, for response. Miss Donne, her skimpy skirt powdered with chalk, explaining a syllogism from the blackboard, turning quietly to them, her face all aglow, her chalky hands gently pressed together, “Do you see? Does anyone see?” Monsieur, spoiling them, sharpening their pencils, letting them cheat over their pages of rules, knowing quite well that each learned only one and directing his questioning accordingly, Monsieur dreaming over the things he read to them, repeating passages, wandering from his subject, making allusions here and there—and all of them, she, at any rate, and Lilla—she knew, often—in paradise. How rich and friendly and helpful they all seemed.
She began to wonder whether hers had been in some way a specially good school. Things had mattered there. Somehow the girls had been made to feel they mattered. She remembered even old Stroodie—the least attached member of the staff—asking her suddenly, once, in the middle of a music lesson what she was going to do with her life and a day when the artistic vice principal—who was a connection by marriage of Holman Hunt’s and had met Ruskin, Miriam knew, several times—had gone from girl to girl round the collected fifth and sixth forms asking them each what they would best like to do in life. Miriam had answered at once with a conviction born that moment that she wanted to “write a book.” It irritated her when she remembered during these reflections that she had not been able to give to Fräulein Pfaff’s public questioning any intelligible account of the school. She might at least have told her of the connection with Ruskin and Browning and Holman Hunt, whereas her muddled replies had led Fräulein to decide that her school had been “a kind of high school.” She knew it had not been this. She felt there was something questionable about a high school. She was beginning to think that her school had been very good. Pater had seen to that—that was one of the things he had steered and seen to. There had been a school they might have gone to higher up the hill where one learned needlework even in the “first class” as they called it instead of the sixth form as at her school, and “Calisthenics” instead of drilling—and something called elocution—where the girls were “finished.” It was an expensive school. Had the teachers there taught the girls … as if they had no minds? Perhaps that school was more like the one she found herself in now? She wondered and wondered. What was she going to do with her life after all these years at the good school? She began bit by bit to understand her agony on the day of leaving. It was there she belonged. She ought to go back and go on.
One day she lay twisted and convulsed, face downwards on her bed at the thought that she could never go back and begin. If only she could really begin now, knowing what she wanted. … She would talk now with those teachers. … Isn’t it all wonderful! Aren’t things wonderful! Tell me some more. … She felt sure that if she could go back, things would get clear. She would talk and think and understand. … She did not linger over that. It threatened a storm whose results would be visible. She wondered what the other girls were doing—Lilla? She had heard nothing of her since that last term. She would write to her one day, perhaps. Perhaps not. … She would have to tell her that she was a governess. Lilla would think that very funny and would not care for her now that she was so old and worried. …
Woven through her retrospective appreciations came a doubt. She wondered whether, after all, her school had been right. Whether it ought to have treated them all so seriously. If she had gone to the other school she was sure she
