20
Minna and Miriam ambled gently along together. Miriam had discarded her little fur pelerine and her double-breasted jacket bulged loosely over the thin fabric of her blouse. She breathed in the leaf-scented air and felt it playing over her breast and neck. She drew deep breaths as they went slowly along under the Waldstrasse lime-trees and looked up again and again at the leaves brilliant opaque green against white plaster with sharp black shadows behind them, or brilliant transparent green on the hard blue sky. She felt that the scent of them must be visible. Every breath she drew was like a long yawning sigh. She felt the easy expansion of her body under her heavy jacket.... “Perhaps I won’t have any more fitted bodices,” she mused and was back for a moment in the stale little sitting-room of the Barnes dressmaker. She remembered deeply breathing in the odour of fabrics and dust and dankness and cracking her newly fitted lining at the pinholes and saying, “It is too tight there”—crack-crack. “I can’t go like that.” ...
“But you never want to go like that, my dear child,” old Miss Ottridge had laughed, readjusting the pins; “just breathe in your ordinary way—there, see? That’s right.”
Perhaps Lilla’s mother was right about blouses ... perhaps they were “slommucky.” She remembered phrases she had heard about people’s figures ... “falling abroad” ... “the middle-aged sprawl” ... that would come early to her as she was so old and worried ... perhaps that was why one had to wear boned bodices ... and never breathe in gulps of air like this?... It was as if all the worry were being taken out of her temples. She felt her eyes grow strong and clear; a coolness flowed through her—obstructed only where she felt the heavy pad of hair pinned to the back of her head, the line of her hat, the hot line of compression round her waist and the confinement of her inflexible boots.
They were approaching the Georgstrasse with its long-vistaed width and its shops and cafés and pedestrians. An officer in pale blue Prussian uniform passed by flashing a single hard preoccupied glance at each of them in turn. His eyes seemed to Miriam like opaque blue glass. She could not remember such eyes in England. They began to walk more quickly. Miriam listened abstractedly to Minna’s anticipations of three days at a friend’s house when she would visit her parents at the end of the week. Minna’s parents, her far-away home on the outskirts of a little town, its garden, their little carriage, the spring, the beautiful country seemed unreal and her efforts to respond and be interested felt like a sort of treachery to her present bliss.... Everybody, even docile Minna, always seemed to want to talk about something else....
Suddenly she was aware that Minna was asking her whether, if it was decided that she should leave school at the end of the term, she, Miriam, would come and live with her.
Miriam beamed incredulously. Minna, crimson-faced, with her eyes on the pavement and hurrying along explained that she was alone at home, that she had never made friends—her mother always wanted her to make friends—but she could not—that her parents would be so delighted—that she, she wanted Miriam, “You, you are so different, so reasonable—I could live with you.”
Minna’s garden, her secure country house, her rich parents, no worries, nothing particular to do, seemed for a moment to Miriam the solution and continuation of all the gay day. There would be the rest of the term—increasing spring and summer—Fräulein divested of all mystery and fear and then freedom—with Minna.
She glanced at Minna—the cheerful pink face and the pink bulb of nose came round to her and in an excited undertone she murmured something about the apotheker.
“I should love to come—simply love it,” said Miriam enthusiastically, feeling that she would not entirely give up the idea yet. She would not shut off the offered refuge. It would be a plan to have in reserve. She had been daunted as Minna murmured by a picture of Minna and herself in that remote garden—she receiving confidences about the apotheker—no one else there—the Waldstrasse household blotted out—herself and Minna finding pretexts day after day to visit the chemist’s in the little town.