To Winifred Ray...

I have read Pointed Roofs three times. The first time it came to me with its original wardrobe, a different dress for every mood; and in some places the handwriting of the manuscript clothed the thoug...

Miriam left the gaslit hall and went slowly upstairs. The March twilight lay upon the landings, but the staircase was almost dark. The top landing was quite dark and silent. There was no one about. It...

The crossing was over. They were arriving. The movement of the little steamer that had collected the passengers from the packet boat drove the raw air against Miriam’s face. In her tired brain the gre...

Miriam was practising on the piano in the larger of the two English bedrooms. Two other pianos were sounding in the house, one across the landing and the other in the Saal where Herr Kapellmeister Bos...

Miriam paid her first visit to a German church the next day, her third Sunday. Of the first Sunday, now so far off, she could remember nothing but sitting in a low-backed chair in the Saal trying to r...

During those early days Miriam realised that school routine, as she knew it⁠—the planned days⁠—the regular unvarying succession of lessons and preparations, had no place in this new world. Even the ma...

Fräulein Pfaff came to the breakfast table a little late in a grey stuff dress with a cream-coloured ruching about the collar-band and ruchings against her long brown wrists. The girls were already in...

“Don’t let her do it, Miss Henderson.” Fräulein Pfaff’s words broke the silence accompanying the servant’s progress from Gertrude whose soup plate she had first seized, to Miriam more than halfway dow...

Walking along a narrow muddy causeway by a little river overhung with willows, girls ahead of her in single file and girls in single file behind, Miriam drearily recognised that it was June. The month...

The next afternoon they all drove in a high, wide brake with an awning, five miles out into the country to have tea at a forest inn. The inn appeared at last standing back from the wide roadway along ...

Towards the end of June there were frequent excursions. Into all the gatherings at Waldstraße the outside world came like a presence. It removed the sense of pressure, of being confronted and challeng...