Funny German dresses, thought Miriam, funny … and old. Her mind hovered and wondered over these German dresses—did she like them or not—something about them—she glanced at Elsa, sitting opposite in the dull faint electric blue with black lace sleeves she had worn since the warm weather set in. Even Ulrica, thin and straight now … like a pole … in a tight flat dress of saffron muslin sprigged with brown leaves, seemed to be included in something that made all these German dresses utterly different from anything the English girls could have worn. What was it? It was crowned by the Bergmanns’ dresses. It had begun in a summer dress of Minna’s, black with a tiny sky-blue spot and a heavy ruche round the hem. She thought she liked it. It seemed to set the full tide of summer round the table more than the things of the English girls—and yet the dresses were ugly—and the English girls’ dresses were not that … they were nothing … plain cottons and zephyrs with lace tuckers—no ruches. It was something … somehow in the ruches—the ruches and the little peaks of neck.
A faint scent of camphor came from the Martins across 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 Fräulein 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 Fräulein’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.
Tea was over. Fräulein decided against a walk and they all trooped into the Saal. No programme was suggested; they all sat about unoccupied. There was no centre; Fräulein Pfaff was one of them. The little group near her in the shady half of the sunlit summerhouse was as quietly easy as those who sat far back in the Saal. Miriam had got into a low chair near the Saal doors whence she could see across the room through the summerhouse window through the gap between the houses across the way to the far-off afternoon country. Its colours gleamed, a soft confusion of tones, under the heat haze. For a while she sat with her eyes on Fräulein’s thin profile, clean and cool and dry in the intense heat … “she must be looking out towards the lime trees.” … Ulrica sat drooped on a low chair near her knees … “sweet beautiful head” … the weight of her soft curved mouth seemed too much for the delicate angles of her face and it drooped faintly, breaking their sharp lines. Miriam wished all the world could see her. … Presently Ulrica raised her head, as Elsa and Clara broke into words and laughter near her, and her drooping lips flattened gently back into their place in the curve of her face. She gazed out through the doorway of the summerhouse with her great despairing eyes … the housekeeper was rather like a Dutch doll … but that was not it.
The sun had set. Miriam had found a little thin volume of German poetry in her pocket. She sat fumbling the leaves. She felt the touch of her limp straightening hair upon her forehead. It did not matter. Twilight would soon come, and bedtime. But it must have been beginning to get like that at teatime. Perhaps the weather would get even hotter. She must do something about her hair … if only she could wear it turned straight back.
There was a stirring in the room; beautiful forms rose
