Miriam groaned. She was a governess now. Someone would ask her that question. She would ask Pater before he went. … No, she would not. … If only he would answer a question simply, and not with a superior air as if he had invented the thing he was telling about. She felt she had a right to all the knowledge there was, without fuss … oh, without fuss—without fuss and—emotion. … I am unsociable, I suppose—she mused. She could not think of anyone who did not offend her. I don’t like men and I loathe women. I am a misanthrope. So’s Pater. He despises women and can’t get on with men. We are different—it’s us, him and me. He’s failed us because he’s different and if he weren’t we should be like other people. Everything in the railway responded and agreed. Like other people … horrible. … She thought of the fathers of girls she knew—the Poole girls, for instance, they were to be “independent” trained and certificated—she envied that—but her envy vanished when she remembered how heartily she had agreed when Sarah called them “sharp” and “knowing.”
Mr. Poole was a business man … common … trade. … If Pater had kept to Grandpa’s business they would be trade, too—well-off, now—all married. Perhaps as it was he had thought they would marry.
She thought sleepily of her Wesleyan grandparents, gravely reading the Wesleyan Methodist Recorder, the shop at Babington, her father’s discontent, his solitary fishing and reading, his discovery of music … science … classical music in the first Novello editions … Faraday … speaking to Faraday after lectures. Marriage … the new house … the red brick wall at the end of the garden where young peach trees were planted … running up and downstairs and singing … both of them singing in the rooms and the garden … she sometimes with her hair down and then when visitors were expected pinned in coils under a little cap and wearing a small hoop … the garden and lawns and shrubbery and the long kitchen garden and the summerhouse under the oaks beyond and the pretty old gabled “town” on the river and the woods all along the river valley and the hills shining up out of the mist. The snow man they both made in the winter—the birth of Sarah and then Eve … his studies and book-buying—and after five years her own disappointing birth as the third girl, and the coming of Harriett just over a year later … her mother’s illness, money troubles—their two years at the sea to retrieve … the disappearance of the sunlit red-walled garden always in full summer sunshine with the sound of bees in it or dark from windows … the narrowing of the house life down to the Marine Villa—with the sea creeping in—wading out through the green shallows, out and out till you were more than waist-deep—shrimping and prawning hour after hour for weeks together … poking in the rock pools, watching the sun and the colours in the strange afternoons … then the sudden large house at Barnes with the “drive” winding to the door. … He used to come home from the City and the Constitutional Club and sometimes instead of reading The Times or the Globe or the Proceedings of the British Association or Herbert Spencer, play Pope Joan or Jacoby with them all, or Table Billiards and laugh and be “silly” and take his turn at being “bumped” by Timmy going the round of the long dining room table, tail in the air; he had taken Sarah and Eve to see Don Giovanni and Winter’s Tale and the new piece, Lohengrin. No one at the tennis club had seen that. He had good taste. No one else had been to Madame Schumann’s Farewell … sitting at the piano with her curtains of hair and her dreamy smile … and the Philharmonic Concerts. No one else knew about the lectures at the Royal Institution, beginning at nine on Fridays. … No one else’s father went with a party of scientific men “for the advancement of science” to Norway or America, seeing the Falls and the Yosemite Valley. No one else took his children as far as Dawlish for the holidays, travelling all day, from eight until seven … no esplanade, the old stone jetty and coves and cowrie shells. …
III
Miriam was practising on the piano in the larger of the two English bedrooms. Two other pianos were sounding in the house, one across the landing and the other in the Saal where Herr Kapellmeister Bossenberger was giving a music lesson. The rest of the girls were gathered in the large schoolroom under the care of Mademoiselle for Saturday’s raccommodage. It was the last hour of the week’s work. Presently there would be a great gonging, the pianos would cease, Fräulein’s voice would sound up through the house “Anziehen zum Aus‑geh‑hen!”
There would be the walk, dinner, the Saturday afternoon home-letters to be written and then, until Monday, holiday, freedom to read and to talk English and idle. And there was a new arrival in the house. Ulrica Hesse had come. Miriam had seen her. There had been three large leather trunks in the hall and a girl with a smooth pure oval of pale face standing wrapped in dark furs, gazing about her with eyes for which Miriam had no word, liquid—limpid—great-saucers, no—pools … great round deeps. … She had felt about for something to express them as she went upstairs with her roll of music. Fräulein Pfaff who had seemed to hover and smile about
