How green the wood I had passed through.”
With a pang she felt it was true that summer ended in dead leaves.
But she had no leaf, nothing to remind her of her summer days. They were all past and she had nothing—not the smallest thing. The two little bunches of flowers she had put away in her desk had all crumbled together, and she could not tell which was which.... There was nothing else—but the things she had told Eve—and perhaps Eve had forgotten ... there was nothing. There were the names in her birthday book! She had forgotten them. She would look at them. She flushed. She would look at them to-morrow, sometime when Mademoiselle was not there.... The room was waking up from its letter-writing. People were moving about. She would not write to-day. It was not worth while beginning. She took a fresh sheet of note-paper and copied her verse, spacing it carefully with a wide margin all round so that it came exactly in the middle of the page. It would soon be tea-time. “Wie grün der Wald.” She remembered one wood—the only one she could remember—there were no woods at Barnes or at the seaside—only that wood, at the very beginning, someone carrying Harriett—and green green, the brightest she had ever seen, and anemones everywhere, she could see them distinctly at this moment—she wanted to put her face down into the green among the anemones. She could not remember how she got there or the going home, but just standing there—the green and the flowers and something in her ear buzzing and frightening her and making her cry, and somebody poking a large finger into the buzzing ear and making it very hot and sore.
The afternoon sitting had broken up. The table was empty.
Emma, in raptures—near the window, was calling to the other Germans. Minna came and chirruped too—there was a sound of dull scratching on the window—then a little burst of admiration from Emma and Minna together. Miriam looked round—in Emma’s hand shone a small antique watch encrusted with jewels; at her side was the new girl. Miriam saw a filmy black dress, and above it a pallid face. What was it like? It was like—like—like jasmine—that was it—jasmine—and out of the jasmine face the great gaze she had met in the morning turned half-puzzled, half-disappointed upon the growing group of girls examining the watch.
CHAPTER IV
1
Miriam paid her first visit to a German church the next day, her third Sunday. Of the first Sunday, now so far off, she could remember nothing but sitting in a low-backed chair in the saal trying to read “Les Travailleurs de la Mer” ... seas ... and a sunburnt youth striding down a desolate lane in a storm ... and the beginning of tea-time. They had been kept indoors all day by the rain.
The second Sunday they had all gone in the evening to the English church with Fräulein Pfaff ... rush-seated chairs with a ledge for books, placed very close together and scrooping on the stone floor with the movements of the congregation ... a little gathering of English people. They seemed very dear for a moment ... what was it about them that was so attractive ... that gave them their air of “refinement”?...
Then as she watched their faces as they sang she felt that she knew all these women, the way, with little personal differences, they would talk, the way they would smile and take things for granted.