3 Sitting on this third Sunday morning in the dim Schloss Kirche--the Waldstrasse pew was in one of its darkest spaces and immediately under the shadow of a deeply overhanging gallery--Miriam understood poor Emma's confessed hysteria over the abruptly alternating kneelings and standings, risings and sittings of an Anglican congregation. Here, there was no need to be on the watch for the next move. The service droned quietly and slowly on. Miriam paid no heed to it. She sat in the comforting darkness. The unobserving Germans were all round her, the English girls tailed away invisibly into the distant obscurity. Fräulein Pfaff was not there, nor Mademoiselle. She was alone with the school. She felt safe for a while and derived solace from the reflection that there would always be church. If she were a governess all her life there would be church. There was a little sting of guilt in the thought. It would be practising deception.... To despise it all, to hate the minister and the choir and the congregation and yet to come--running--she could imagine herself all her life running, at least in her mind, weekly to some church--working her fingers into their gloves and pretending to take everything for granted and to be just like everybody else and really thinking only of getting into a quiet pew and ceasing to pretend. It was wrong to use church like that. She was wrong--all wrong. It couldn't be helped. Who was there who could help her? She imagined herself going to a clergyman and saying she was bad and wanted to be good--even crying. He would be kind and would pray and smile--and she would be told to listen to sermons in the right spirit. She could never do that.... There she felt she was on solid ground. Listening to sermons was wrong ... people ought to refuse to be preached at by these men. Trying to listen to them made her more furious than anything she could think of, more base in submitting ... those men's sermons were worse than women's smiles ... just as insincere at any rate ... and you could get away from the smiles, make it plain you did not agree and that things were not simple and settled ... but you could not stop a sermon. It was so unfair. The service might be lovely, if you did not listen to the words; and then the man got up and went on and on from unsound premises until your brain was sick ... droning on and on and getting more and more pleased with himself and emphatic ... and nothing behind it. As often as not you could pick out the logical fallacy if you took the trouble.... Preachers knew no more than anyone else ... you could see by their faces ... sheeps' faces.... What a terrible life ... and wives and children in the homes taking them for granted.... 4