Woven through her retrospective appreciations came a doubt. She wondered whether, after all, her school had been right. Whether it ought to have treated them all so seriously. If she had gone to the other school she was sure she would never have heard of the Æsthetic Movement or felt troubled about the state of Ireland and India. Perhaps she would have grown up a Churchwoman ... and "lady-like." Never. She could only think that somehow she must be "different"; that a sprinkling of the girls collected in that school were different, too. The school she decided was new--modern--Ruskin. Most of the girls perhaps had not been affected by it. But some had. She had. The thought stirred her. She had. It was mysterious. Was it the school or herself? Herself to begin with. If she had been brought up differently, it could not, she felt sure, have made her very different--for long--nor taught her to be affable--to smile that smile she hated so. The school had done something to her. It had not gone against the things she found in herself. She wondered once or twice during these early weeks what she would have been like if she had been brought up with these German girls. What they were going to do with their lives was only too plain. All but Emma, she had been astounded to discover, had already a complete outfit of house-linen to which they were now adding fine embroideries and laces. All could cook. Minna had startled her one day by exclaiming with lit face, "Ach, ich koche so _schrecklich_ gern!" ... Oh, I am so frightfully fond of cooking.... And they were placid and serene, secure in a kind of security Miriam had never met before. They did not seem to be in the least afraid of the future. She envied that. Their eyes and their hands were serene.... They would have houses and things they could do and understand, always.... How they must want to begin, she mused.... What a prison school must seem. She thought of their comfortable German homes, of ruling and shopping and directing and being looked up to.... German husbands. That thought she shirked. Emma in particular she could not contemplate in relation to a German husband. In any case one day these girls would be middle-aged ... as Clara looked now ... they would look like the German women on the boulevards and in the shops. In the end she ceased to wonder that the German masters dealt out their wares to these girls so superciliously. And yet ... German music, a line of German poetry, a sudden light on Clara's face.... 6