of desire, authority, and modernity. The opening of the novel shows Hanna in her modest room comforting Gertrud, whose mother has torn up a secret notebook of treasured quotations, and recalls how Hanna first won the troubled girl’s trust after a schoolyard clash. Three years pass: Hanna’s life is wholly bound to the girls’ school; she mistrusts parents’ evasions, tutors a boy (Erwin) who idolizes a powerful statesman, and is disturbed when a young couple she knows return entranced by the free-spirited sculptor Alexandra. As puberty transforms her class—bringing giggles, panic, and a classmate’s death from illness—an anonymous report leads Hanna and a colleague to a night club, where they find a pupil with an actor and then heading to a hotel, a shock compounded when Hanna later glimpses her married friend in an intimate night scene. She struggles to teach amid the girls’ new obsessions, grows painfully distant from Gertrud, and suffers a private crisis about aging and solitude; the section closes with another student, Grete, raging at adult lies and at books that ignore girls’ inner battles. (This is an automatically generated summary.)