She chose a familiar-looking éclair--Clara and Emma ate cakes that seemed to be alternate slices of cream and very spongy coffee-coloured cake and then followed Emma's lead with an open tartlet on which plump green gooseberries stood in a thick brown syrup. 12 During dinner Fräulein Pfaff went the round of the table with questions as to what had been consumed at Kreipe's. The whole of the table on her right confessed to one Kuchen with their chocolate. In each case she smiled gravely and required the cake to be described. The meaning of the pilgrimage of enquiry came to Miriam when Fräulein reached Gertrude and beamed affectionately in response to her careless "Schokolade und ein Biskuit." Miriam and the Bergmanns were alone in their excesses. 13 Even walks were incalculable excepting on Saturdays, when at noon Anna turned out the schoolrooms. Then--unless to Miriam's great satisfaction it rained and they had a little festival shut in in holiday mood in the saal, the girls playing and singing, Anna loudly obliterating the week-days next door and the secure harbour of Sunday ahead--they went methodically out and promenaded the streets of Hanover for an hour. These Saturday walks were a recurring humiliation. If they had occurred daily, some crisis, she felt sure would have arisen for her. The little party would file out under the leadership of Gertrude--Fräulein Pfaff smiling parting directions adjuring them to come back safe and happy to the beehive and stabbing at them all the while, Miriam felt, with her keen eye--through the high doorway that pierced the high wall and then--charge down the street. Gertrude alone, having been in Hanover and under Fräulein Pfaff's care since her ninth year, was instructed as to the detail of their tour and she swung striding on ahead, the ends of her long fur boa flying out in the March wind, making a flourishing scrollwork round her bounding tailor-clad form--the Martins, short-skirted and thick-booted, with hard cloth jackets and hard felt hats, and short thick pelerines almost running on either side, Jimmie, Millie and Judy hard behind. Miriam's ever-recurring joyous sense of emergence and her longing to go leisurely and alone along these wonderful streets, to go on and on at first and presently to look, had to give way to the necessity of keeping Gertrude and her companions in sight. On they went relentlessly through the Saturday throng along the great Georgstrasse--a foreign paradise, with its great bright cafés and the strange promising detail of its shops--tantalisingly half seen.