"Sie, nun, Miss Henderson," concluded Fräulein, handing her the book and indicating the passage Ulrica had just read. "Nun _Sie_," she repeated brightly, and Minna drew her chair a little nearer making a small group. 4 "Schiller" she saw at the top of the page and the title of the poem "Der Spaziergang." Miriam laid the book on the end of her knee, and leaning over it, read nervously. Her tones reassured her. She noticed that she read very slowly, breaking up the rhythm into sentences--and authoritatively as if she were recounting an experience of her own. She knew at first that she was reading like a cultured person and that Fräulein would recognise this at once, she knew that the perfect assurance of her pronunciation would make it seem that she understood every word, but soon these feelings gave way to the sense half grasped of the serpentine path winding and mounting through a wood, of a glimpse of a distant valley, of flocks and villages, and of her unity with Fräulein and Minna seeing and feeling all these things together. She finished the passage--Fräulein quietly commended her reading and Minna said something about her earnestness. "Miss Henderson is always a little earnest," said Fräulein affectionately. 5 "Are you dressed, Hendy?" Miriam, who had sat up in her bath when the drumming came at the door, answered sleepily, "No, I shan't be a minute." "Don't you want to see the diving?" All Jimmie's fingers seemed to be playing exercises against the panels. Miriam wished she would restrain them and leave her alone. She did not in the least wish to see the diving. "I shan't be a minute," she shouted crossly, and let her shoulders sink once more under the comforting water. It was the first warm water she had encountered since that night when Mademoiselle had carried the jugs upstairs. Her soap, so characterless in the chilly morning basin lathered freely in the warmth and was fragrant in the steamy air. When Jimmie's knocking came she was dreaming blissfully of baths with Harriett--the dissipated baths of the last six months between tea and dinner with a theatre or a dance ahead. Harriett, her hair strained tightly into a white crocheted net, her snub face shining through the thick steam, tubbing and jesting at the wide end of the huge porcelain bath, herself at the narrow end commanding the taps under the steam-dimmed beams of the red-globed gasjets ... sponge-fights ... and those wonderful summer bathings when they had come in from long tennis-playing in the sun, filled the bath with cold water and sat in the silence of broad daylight immersed to the neck, confronting each other.