So that was it. It was the new girl. Lily, was Fräulein Pfaff. So the new girl wore her hair in a classic knot. How lovely. Without her hat she had "a charming little head," Minna had said. And that face. Minna had seen how lovely she was and had not minded. Clara was jealous. Her head with a classic knot and no fringe, her worn-looking sallow face.... She would look like a "prisoner at the bar" in some newspaper. How they hated Fräulein Pfaff. The Germans at least. Fancy calling her Lily--Miriam did not like it, she had known at once. None of the teachers at school had been called by their Christian names--there had been old Quagmire, the Elfkin, and dear Donnikin, Stroodie, and good old Kingie and all of them--but no Christian names. Oh yes--Sally--so there had--Sally--but then Sally _was_--couldn't have been anything else--never could have held a position of any sort. They ought not to call Fräulein Pfaff that. It was, somehow, nasty. Did the English girls do it? Ought she to have said anything? Mademoiselle did not seem at all shocked. Where was Fräulein Pfaff all this time? Perhaps somewhere hidden away, in her rooms, being "done" by Frau Krause. Fancy telling them all to alter the way they did their hair. 21 Everyone was writing Saturday letters--Mademoiselle and the Germans with compressed lips and fine careful evenly moving pen-points; the English scrawling and scraping and dashing, their pens at all angles and careless, eager faces. An almost unbroken silence seemed the order of the earlier part of a Saturday afternoon. To-day the room was very still, save for the slight movements of the writers. At intervals nothing was to be heard but the little chorus of pens. Clara, still smouldering, sitting at the window end of the room looked now and again gloomily out into the garden. Miriam did not want to write letters. She sat, pen in hand, and note-paper in front of her, feeling that she loved the atmosphere of these Saturday afternoons. This was her second. She had been in the school a fortnight--the first Saturday she had spent writing to her mother--a long letter for everyone to read, full of first impressions and enclosing a slangy almost affectionate little note for Harriett. In her general letter she had said, "If you want to think of something jolly, think of me, here." She had hesitated over that sentence when she considered meal-times, especially the midday meal, but on the whole she had decided to let it stand--this afternoon she felt it was truer. She was beginning to belong to the house--she did not want to write letters--but just to sit revelling in the sense of this room full of quietly occupied girls--in the first hours of the weekly holiday. She thought of strange Ulrica somewhere upstairs and felt quite one of the old gang. "Ages" she had known all these girls. She was not afraid of them at all. She would not be afraid of them any more. Emma Bergmann