The “high spot” in her experience at the German school is revealed in the answer to the question: Why could not Miriam get on with “tall Fraulein Pfaff smiling her horse smile”? Miriam leaves the school cloaked in injured innocence. But the cloak is no mask for the native wit of the schoolgirls. They know—and Miriam knows—that the answer is the old Swiss teacher of French upon whom the Fraulein herself has designs. Even before he is revealed reading poetry to the class with a simper while Miriam makes eyes at him, or in a purported chance encounter alone in the saal, the girls have twitted Miriam in a way that would have warned a more sensible girl that she was venturing upon dangerous ground. But Miriam's demon had made her insensible to such hints, just as it had robbed her of the common sense which would have made her understand, even without warnings, that she could not work for a woman and “go vamping” on her preserves.
If Miriam's flirtation with the Swiss professor had been in a spirit of frolicsomeness it would have presented at least one hopeful symptom. But Miriam is incapable of frolicking—abnormally so. The absence of the play impulse in her is striking, as is the lack of spontaneous admirations or enthusiasms for people or things. Her impressions are always in terms of sensuous attraction or repulsion—never influenced by appeal to intellect, æsthetic taste, admiration, or ambition. Other girls exist for her, not as kindred spirits, but as potential rivals—even her sisters—and she is keen to size them up solely by qualities which she senses may make them attractive to the other sex. The exceptions to this are certain German girls whose over-sentimental make-up furnishes easy material for Miriam's starved libido.
The next picture is at her country home where a dance has been staged, in Miriam's own consciousness, especially as a temporary farewell appearance of the “white twinkling figure,” now materialised into Ted. Ted appears on programme time bringing with him a strange young man with a German name and manner of speech, with whom she promptly goes off spooning in a dark conservatory, where she is discovered by Ted. She hopes the scene will stir Ted to emulation. But it does not. When she returns to the light Ted has gone home. And that seems to be the last of him. The strange young man is keen to announce his departure the coming day for foreign parts. So Miriam is left to set off for her next school without further adventures in love-making, and the reader is left to wonder whether she is not one of the girls who are incurably given to taking their Teds more seriously than they intend to be taken.
In “Backwater” Miriam is a teacher of little girls in a Bambury Park school kept by three quaint refined little old English women—a palatable contrast to the coarseness of Fraulein Pfaff—for nine months. She is successful as a teacher, but finds her situation unendurable and resigns. The emotional shallowness of the girls and their lower middle-class mothers with aspirations to “get on” are dreary, but hardly sufficiently dismal to provoke the black despair and unreasoning rage which cause her to cry out in her moments of revolt, “But why must I be one of those to give everything up?” There is no masculine element connected with the school life, as there had been with that of the German school. She contrasts herself with her sisters who have made adaptations to life, two having become engaged and the third having settled happily into a position as governess. But Miriam can not settle, nor adapt. Her demon will not permit.
A girl of nineteen, brought up in middle-class culture, without previous experiences except as teacher in two girls' schools, becomes governess, as “Honeycomb” relates, in the country home of a Q. C., upon the introduction of friends of a future brother-in-law. From the day of her arrival her wishful thinking revolves around the man of the family. She loathes teaching the children and fails to hide from them her boredom. By lampooning the eccentricities and stupidities of Mrs. Corrie she betrays her hatred of women, her besetting “inferiority complex,” which, in this instance, is partly justified by the adult infantilism of the lady and her absorbing attachment to a woman of questionable morality. Without anything to which to tie it on the other side, Miriam constructs—as a spider might a web out of her own unconscious self—a bridge of affinity between herself and the Q. C., placing such significance as her demon prompts upon his insignificant words or looks, until he snubs her at dinner when she attempts to take too leading a part in the conversation. Immediately she hates it all, with the collapse of her bridge, and is ready to throw up her “job” and all it implies.
Romance would seem remote from a hall bedroom in a sordid London rooming-house and the duties of first aid to a firm of dentists. But this is where Miriam finds it, for a time at least. The central figure is one of the dentists in whom her autistic thoughts discover a lonely sensitive man eager for the sympathetic understanding which Miriam is ready to offer. The boredom of teaching gives place to ecstasy in the discharge of the details, often repellent, which go to fill up the “strange rich difficult day.” Her drab existence becomes a charmed life until Miriam's libido, which has been running away with her like a wild horse, shies right across the road at the first young girl she sights within the orbit of the dentist. Judging from the reaction of the latter, the explosion of jealousy and hatred that took place in Miriam's mind must have found outward expression, for he retreats behind a barrier of an “official tone,” which infuriates Miriam into demanding an explanation and brings in reply to her demand a letter from him beginning: “Dear Miss Henderson—You are very persistent”; and concluding “foolish gossip which might end by making your position untenable.” For the first time Miriam admits her folly, saying,
“I have nothing now but my pained self again, having violently rushed at things and torn them to bits. It's all my fault from the very beginning.... I make people hate me by knowing them and dashing my head against the wall of their behaviour.... I did not know what I had. Friendship is fine, fine porcelain. I have sent a crack right through it.... Mrs. Bailey (her landlady) ... numbers of people I never think of would like to have me always there.... At least I have broken up his confounded complacency.”
When Miriam's dingy lodging-house becomes a boarding-house new food comes to her creative urge in the form of daily association with masculine boarders. Her resolution in the early pages of “Interim” to take “no more interest in men,” collapses like a house of cards upon the first onslaught. A close companionship develops between her and a Spanish Jew of more than unconventional ideas and habits. But her special devil is soon busy again, and Miriam discovers romance in the presence in the house of a young Canadian who is studying in London. When he comes into the dining-room where Miriam is sitting with other boarders after dinner, and sits down with his books to study:
“He did not see that she was astonished at his coming nor her still deeper astonishment in the discovery of her unconscious certainty that he would come. A haunting familiar sense of unreality possessed her. Once more she was part of a novel; it was right, true like a book for Dr. Heber to come in in defiance of every one, bringing his studies into the public room in order to sit down quietly opposite this fair young English girl. He saw her apparently gravely studious and felt he could 'pursue his own studies' all the better for her presence.... Perhaps if he remained steadily like that in her life she could grow into some semblance of his steady reverent observation. He did not miss any movement or change of expression.... It was glorious to have a real, simple homage coming from a man who was no simpleton, coming simple, strong and kindly from Canada to put you in a shrine....”
And yet all he does is to look at her! She goes for a walk and