One of the best of the "best rooms" in Berlin which are to be found in houses having once known those renowned better days and which are let out to decent young women for thirty marks, including service and breakfast, was to be had from the widow Clothilde Laue.

It contained red plush furniture, which embodied the acme of good taste at the time of the Franco-Prussian War. It contained a pier glass fantastically stuck from top to bottom with New Year's cards, cards of congratulation, and illustrated advertisements of soaps and powders. It contained photographs on the walls of actors once famous, whose fame in the meantime had faded no less than the autographs they had written beneath their pictures. It contained a washstand, whose marble top was covered with a tidy embroidered with the sententious couplet:

It contained photograph albums, card-cases, a cigar clip in the shape of a windmill of olive wood, a green glass punch bowl, and a shaky pine bed modestly hidden behind blue woolen portiÈres.

It contained, finally, hung over the sofa in a gilt-edged glass case, a mysterious round creation. The thing consisted of six strips of paper braided together and radiating from a common centre. It was covered with gauze, beneath which the outline of pressed flowers could dimly be distinguished.

It was in this best room on Neanderstrasse, four flights up, over a china shop, a piano-renting establishment, and a "repair studio," from the windows of which room an oblique view was to be obtained of the greenish grey waves of the Engelbecken, and into which a broad expanse of genuine Berlin smoky sky actually shone, that Lilly one day landed.

Mrs. Laue was a woman of fifty, worn out by overwork, with a face like a dried apple, and great staring, tearful eyes. She circled about Lilly in incredulous admiration, as if unable to comprehend that so much brilliance and beauty had strayed into her home.

The very day of her arrival Lilly was informed of her history. Her husband had been cashier and bookkeeper at one of the favorite variety theatres in Berlin, and twenty years before had departed this world, leaving her without home or protection. There was no rosy glamour to glorify tears wept in solitude, no comic songs to drown the cry of hunger.

Here that mysterious round creation, which on closer inspection proved to be a lamp shade, came to her rescue. It had been presented to her by an artistic friend, and it occurred to her to use it as a model for making others to sell.

After peddling her wares about for years, after long drudgery and disenchantments of all sorts, she at last conquered a market for her "pressed-flower lamp shades," and won for herself a name as specialist in her field.

In her back room with one window, which smelled of hay and paste, and where hundreds of dried flowers lay on a long white deal table—she herself did not gather them, of course, for lack of time—she had worked for nearly two decades tapping, daubing, pasting, drying, threading, and weaving sixteen hours a day, and had earned—thanks to her renown as a specialist!—so much that she was compelled to rent her best room, her treasure chamber, her sanctuary, to a stranger for thirty marks a month.

Lilly and Mrs. Laue, it is true, did not remain strangers.

Into the existence of this back-room being, in whose eyes a few betinseled ballet-dancers were paragons of beauty, the embodiment of unattainable splendour, Lilly descended from the world of genuine aristocracy as from heavenly heights. Her hostess idolised her, because she saw in her a messenger from that wholly improbable land which exists only in novels, and in which words like "lackey" and "drawing-room," and "pearl necklace"—Lilly soon told Mrs. Laue of hers—and other such things as one allows to melt on one's tongue with half-closed eyes, are taken as a matter of course.

Mrs. Laue immediately became Lilly's confidante and counsellor. She helped her overcome the shame consequent upon the divorce trial, she encouraged her when the feeling of being lost unnerved her, and she held before her eyes the prospect of a radiant future.

In great, powerful, wonder-working Berlin, nobody need succumb. Every day a dozen lucky chances might occur to help one to one's feet. There were lonely old ladies who were desperately seeking heiresses for their fortunes, there were noble young women who, disgusted with the artificiality of their surroundings, helplessly yearned to reach out the hand of companionship to a beautiful poor orphan; there were celebrated artists who sought to escape the snares of lewd women in the arms of a pure love; there were great poets with whom the position of muse had become vacant.

The whole city seemed to have been waiting for Lilly's coming to lift her jubilantly to the throne of mistress.

More months passed.

Regret for her squandered life gradually lost its edge. Her nights became calmer. She no longer started out of a drowse with a cry because some picture of her paradise lost stood before her with horrible vividness.

But one thing she did not learn: to consider the brief span during which she had wandered on the heights as a mere episode that had interrupted her true, modest life like a caprice, a dream. In her consciousness she was and remained a sort of enchanted princess in the guise of a beggar until it pleased Providence to reinstate her in her own.

She solicitously cherished everything reminding her of her vanished glory.

The gala robes the colonel had had made for her in Dresden hung in Mrs. Laue's wardrobe; her underwear embroidered with the seven-pointed coronet filled Mrs. Laue's empty drawers with their blossom-like delicacy, and in a long row in front of the tall mirror in Mrs. Laue's best room lay the superb toilet articles of ivory and gold which had once been the pride of her "boudoir." These, too, still bore the seven-pointed coronet. Lilly would have considered it an outrage upon her most sacred rights had she had to part with them.

And all the time she awaited the future. She still studied advertisements, and wrote letters applying for positions; but the advertisements were usually forgotten and the letters seldom mailed.

However, feeling the need of occupation and companionship, she got into the habit of sitting with Mrs. Laue in the back room and helping her with her work. Soon she, too, was tapping, pasting, daubing, threading, and weaving just like her teacher. Having inherited taste and talent for everything artistic she soon outstripped Mrs. Laue. After having sold the shades Mrs. Laue would relate without envy how the patterns she designed and set together were instantly recognised and preferred.

Lilly's ambition was aroused. She strove to create works of art. She could not toil enough.

"If you wouldn't fool such a time over every little spray," was Mrs. Laue's criticism, "you would make more money than I do." After each transaction Mrs. Laue honestly settled accounts with Lilly.

But Lilly was satisfied with the forty or fifty marks a month that her work brought in. Her newly aroused fancy flew toward higher goals.

The dried grasses, the "grass flowers," as Mrs. Laue called them, charmed her especially. Their slender, aspiring stalks, the delicate grace of their branchings, the weary mourning of their hanging sprays, caused them to resemble tiny trees, weeping willows at the edge of a brook, ash-trees inclining over marble urns, or palms longingly rooted on parched rocks.

Lilly dreamed of a new sort of art—paintings on transparent glass with foregrounds of dried grass; lamp shades and window shades, on which woods of flowering grass and ferns charmingly shaded pasteboard houses standing out in relief with their windows cut out to let light shine as if from within; fleecy clouds, glowing sunsets, ridges of hills in hazy outline, and dark blue rivers, across which the moon threw swaying bridges of light.

An endless succession of pictures suddenly took form in Lilly's mind, and new ones kept coming and coming. She did not know what to do with all that wealth of imagery.

Mrs. Laue, who for twenty years had unswervingly stuck to pasting her oiled paper and felt that every desire to abandon her modest work was heretical, warned Lilly with all her might.

But Lilly was possessed.

And one day she resorted to extreme measures. She took her arrow-shaped brooch set with six small emeralds to the jeweler, who gave her eighty marks. It was worth five times as much, of course. She used the money to buy polished cut-glass plates, which were held together in pairs by brass screws and could be hung at the window by dainty chains. She also purchased a box of paints, and while Mrs. Laue clasped her hands in dismay, she set to painting bravely.

But her skill, which consisted of nothing more than some recollections of water-color lessons at high school, failed her utterly. The colors ran together, and the woods in the foreground, which had significance and value only in conjunction with the painted landscape, remained nothing but fern leaves and grass blades, rooted in nothingness.

Lilly agonised a long time. Finally shedding hot tears she threw all the stuff into a corner, and ruefully returned to her lamp shades. She again took to pasting oiled paper wings and weaving six of them together with white silk ribbons.

Mrs. Laue, who during the weeks of Lilly's truancy had maintained glum silence, took again to depicting seductive futures. All the fancies that had been held fast in her poor brain for twenty long years were set free, now that she herself had nothing to hope for, and were laid in Lilly's outstretched hands.

As for Lilly, she continued to listen greedily; but a feeling began to oppress her soul that as her life went on—that which she called life—she was sinking slowly, almost imperceptibly, but deeper, deeper every day into this dark, sorry existence; and she was tormented by a horror of her landlady, of that limited human being in whose great, watery, red-rimmed eyes a hopeless desire for life's attractions still shone, although her lamp shades had brought her nearly to the edge of the grave.

This horror often came upon Lilly so powerfully that she had to run out of doors, no matter where—out into the world, into the arms of life.

Before an hour had elapsed she was back again. The streets frightened her. The painted prostitutes who brushed her shoulders, the young fellows hunting for game who trotted behind her, the unconcerned brazenness with which each and every one elbowed his way—all this filled her with apprehension and made a coward of her.

A dim feeling told her she would never again be equal to that lusty independence which takes pleasure in fight. She seemed to herself a helpless cripple, when she remembered the poor shop-girl who in cozy security performed her duties among Mrs. Asmussen's old volumes, and felt she was in the right even when she lied and deceived and was beaten and obviously was in the wrong.

Then the waiting—the waiting—the never-sleeping, ever-hungry waiting.

For what? She herself did not know.

But something had to come. Her life could not end here among those bits of oiled paper.

From time to time the thought of the rich bronze manufacturer to whom Walter had recommended her rose to the surface of her soul as a vague craving. But the fervor with which she clung to this shadow terrified her, and she instantly chased it from her mind.

A year had passed since Walter's letter had been written. It was much too late to seek help from him.

So she waited a few months more.

Sometimes when her glance fell on the mirror while she was undressing and she beheld the image of a human being consecrated by beauty, round, slim, with long-lashed, yearning eyes and a mouth ripened by kisses, glad astonishment seized her at the thought: "Is that myself?" And she was overcome by a transport compounded of consciousness of her youth and readiness for love.

The world was there just to press her to its heart. Then even that dingy work-a-day existence became a blessing, because it keyed up her energies to intoxication and flight.

And at twilight, when she stretched herself on the sofa in a brief moment of leisure, and saw the blue flash of the electric tram flit across the ceiling, dreams came gently gliding upon her, resolving that burning expectancy into soft, half-fulfilled desires; a feeling that she had been saved stole over her soul like a thanksgiving, and that which she usually bewailed as lost happiness became nothing more than a nightmare from which a benign destiny had freed her.

But such hours were rare. And they resembled the solacing mirage that arises before the eyes of the thirsty traveller, rather than the drink itself.

The winter passed in fog and rain.

Now came the mild March evenings when rosy clouds floated like blossoms over the house tops. Then came spring itself. The freshly trimmed little trees on the open places put forth brownish green buds, which by degrees turned into pale bunches of leaves.

Lilly saw as little of all that glad bourgeoning, that snowy florescence of cherry trees, that brilliant glow of the hawthorne as when she dusted the yellow powder from Mrs. Asmussen's bookcases.

Mrs. Laue did not like taking walks. To her the idea of passing a meadow without gathering flowers, or a garden without thrusting her hand between the rails, was inconceivable; and she feared being caught in the act, an experience she had often had.

Lilly for her part would not venture out alone, dreading the unrestrained crowd.

Then came those hot, hazy, oppressive Sunday afternoons when endless throngs stream from the city to the suburbs, when the streets lie stretched out dead in all their length, and when the overcast heavens fairly weigh upon those who have been left to pant between the walls of the houses.

On those afternoons Mrs. Laue would stick genuine rhinestone studs into her ears, would don a brown velvet dress with a black jet collar on the square-cut neck, and in this costume would pay Lilly a formal visit in the best room. The Dresden gowns would be taken from the wardrobe and carefully compared with the gorgeous dresses worn by the charming ladies of the proscenium box twenty-five years before. The faded pictures of long-forgotten stars would be fetched down from the walls and examined as to their charms. Exciting tales would be told of their own adventures, in which, amid blithe sinning, marital fidelity asserted its modest worth.

The afternoon would decline pale and perspiring as a fever patient. A hot breeze would blow in through the window. The varnish of the rosewood furniture would reek, the walls of the houses opposite would shine as if polished with wax, and Mrs. Laue, munching her cheese cake, would again repeat the tale of her stale virtues.

When at last she took leave Lilly would groan and sink on her bed, burying her face in the close-smelling pillows. From without she would hear the shouts of the merry-makers returning from the country.

The next morning the pasting of flowers would begin anew.

July came. She could no longer endure it.

One Monday, while she was lying in bed and early dawn found her still awake, still waiting, her pillow wet with tears, the desire for life suddenly gripped her heart so strongly that she jumped from bed with an outcry, a jubilant exclamation, and finally determined: "I will do it to-day. I will take the difficult step, and go on a begging pilgrimage to that strange man."

But no—mercy, no! Beg—she would not beg. Oh, she had long before carefully arranged all that.

She would merely ask for a bit of advice, which an experienced connoisseur of arts and crafts could easily give without sacrificing more than five minutes of his business time. She would simply find out from him how and where she could learn transparency-painting.

Whatever his answer, the foundations of a new life would have been laid.