This school interlude comprises only the last third of the novel, the previous sections portraying Manuela’s development from her earliest memories to the time of her entering the institution. The family has moved from one army post to another, the necessity for maintaining her father’s military prestige taking precedence over all other family needs. The girl was first passionately devoted to her mother. During pre-adolescence she falls in love with a public schoolmate, Eva, who is also the choice of her older brother. Manuela spins fantasies of being a male acrobat or dramatically winning the notice of her adored in other ways, but it is only as Berti’s sister that she is of interest to Eva. After her mother’s death, at thirteen, she has a brief and stimulating friendship with a boy violinist, but it is his mother who appeals to her emotionally and to whom she sends flowers. When the woman embraces her, she experiences the first stirrings of unrecognized passion. Aware of her obvious blossoming, her father’s prim housekeeper assumes it is young Fritz who has roused her emotions, and the woman persuades her father and aunt that she must be separated from him. Hence the boarding school. Here one has an uncommonly high-strung child with a strong mother-fixation, without friends of her own age up to the time of her mother’s death. She often mentally assumes a boy’s role because only men and boys seem to count in the life about her. At puberty she is deprived of both mother and mother-substitute and shut into a virtual military prison, the opposite of her hitherto relatively free existence. Both the inevitable emotional explosion at school and the careful preparation for it owe a debt to Freudian theory.