Each spring in a man's life has its peculiar aspect and its peculiar history. Each spring finds him different, each stirs new depths and opens fresh, hidden wounds. One spring passes by like a dull, vapid game, because he himself just then happens to be dull and vapid. Another tortures him with a thousand fruitless admonitions, because he cannot pay off a penny of the debt he owes himself. A third finds him listless and sodden as a field which cannot recover from the winter stress. And again the spring-time chants deceptive hymns of liberation and redemption in his heart, as if it had the power to liberate and redeem.

But most beautiful is that spring of which we are scarcely aware for all the spring joy within us; whose bourgeoning seems but a reflection of our spiritual bourgeoning, and which is but the accompaniment of the mighty growth that broadens our minds and souls and fairly bursts the bonds of our being.

Such a spring broke upon Lilly.

Everything took on a new aspect. Never had the morning sun painted such crinkly, laughing grotesques on the walls. Never had rainy days enveloped the world in such languishing violet twilights. Never had people's faces been brightened by so much expectant festivity. Never had the din and bustle of the streets revealed so much joyous, purposeful activity.

Why, all of a sudden Lilly also was overwhelmed with work.

Every hour was filled with urgent occupations. If anyone in the last few years had dared to tell her that the day would come again when with burning cheeks and a heated brain she would indiscriminately cram names, dates, biographies, lists of great men's works, poetical quotations, and foreign terms, she would have laughed him to scorn.

But it would never do to loaf now. She must be ready with a response on any occasion, just as she had been when he asked her about Giotto. All her eagerness for knowledge, which a feeling of spiritual isolation and aimless endeavour had dammed up within her for years, now gushed out. Her mind, insatiate as a fallow, unfertilised field, absorbed whatever was thrown upon it. She scarcely needed to put forth the least effort. If she merely imagined herself repeating it to him, it remained in her memory.

She went at her studies with the utmost secrecy. Konrad—yes, his name was Konrad—must not suspect that her wisdom had just issued brand-new from the laboratory. She also kept her visits to the museums a secret. He was to suppose she had always been thoroughly familiar with the masters. In addition she had to practice many a piece of early music which he wished to hear for his work. And often she blessed her father's strict hand which had held her down on the piano stool throughout many a long night.

Lilly and Dr. Rennschmidt saw a great deal of each other—every other evening of course. He avoided coming afternoons, which, he knew, belonged to her betrothed's friend. But often he ran up to her in the middle of the day to bring her a book or some flowers and ask her for a bit of music. No matter how much she pressed him, he never remained for a meal. In fact, he seemed not to feel quite at ease in her apartment. He would walk up and down incessantly, pretty soon glance at the clock, and take leave. At first she felt hurt, then she asked him teasingly whether he thought he was in an enemy's country, and finally she adopted the policy of laissez faire.

Oh, she did not yet thoroughly understand him. Each day laid bare new, unusual sides of his being.

He was still very young. Not only in years. She had met many a cold, blasÉ old man of twenty-five. His youth was deep-seated. He thought passionately. Lilly had never seen such fervour expended on pure thinking. Ideas seemed to him like tangible beings with which he had to strive breast to breast, and which he drew to himself if they proved to be friendly to his intellectual attitude, or rejected if hostile. Similarly, great thinkers and creators of the past were either allies or enemies. He associated with them as with teachers and comrades, adoring or despising them, submitting to their reprimands, or turning them into laughing-stocks.

His thoughts and speech were in a constant state of flux with counter-currents and a whirl of contradictions. He was like a man forcibly cleaving a way, or giving merciless chase. He never remained indifferent or apathetic to a phenomenon, spiritual or physical. Everywhere he saw problems to be solved and vexed questions in regard to which he must take one side or the other. He either loved or hated. He scarcely knew a stage between.

And Lilly followed him with all the ardour of a pupil and lover. She planted each idea of his in her being and let it take root or die as chance willed. No need to cherish it; she enjoyed sufficient wealth without it.

He spoke little of his personal matters, not from distrust or reserve, but because he deemed them of small importance. Lilly had to extract jots of information by questioning.

He was very enthusiastic about his parents, though their pictures seemed to have faded in his mind or lost form.

His uncle had taken their place, the self-made man and globe-trotter who had made Dr. Rennschmidt his heir, and who even during his lifetime allowed him means for a modest, yet care-free existence.

Lilly could not fathom the inner relationship of the two men. Sometimes, it seemed, Dr. Rennschmidt cherished a tender love for the old man. Then again he was skeptical, almost bitter in his judgment of him. Evidently a profound difference existed in their natures, though they struggled for compromise.

He had few friends—chiefly old fellow-students—and he never paid purely social visits. As a result he could spend all his leisure hours with Lilly.

They sat in the restaurants, generally the little Italian bodega, until the waiter turned out the lights over their heads, to their invariable surprise—they had just come.

Or they bought their suppers for a few pennies at a delicatessen shop, and escaped the city dust in the Tiergarten, where they hunted up an empty bench somewhat removed from the public ways, yet not in too secluded a spot. It was not until love couples began to wander by in the dark like shades of the netherworld that they felt wholly concealed; and if others seated themselves on the same bench, they little objected, knowing well that love couples would never remain beside them long. They had much more urgent need of the night and solitude than Lilly and Konrad.

While the light green leaves, still stemless, gradually melted into a dark, shadowy, jagged mass, and the sunset flames above merged into the sombre purple of night, and the nightingale sang for them sometimes only a few feet away, they would sit there shoulder to shoulder waiting for the stars to dot the twilight, each evening later and fewer in number.

Their winged thoughts travelled far into the realms of music, painting, northern sagas and Italian landscapes. Questions of infinity arose, hesitating and halting, and were promptly disposed of with the sure, clear discernment of a happy, youthful latitudinarianism. Lilly was now accurately informed of the meaning of the universe and immortality and the soul and God.

Often she felt as if she had been left alone to freeze in a vast, icy waste where there was no Father, no life after death, and certainly no St. Joseph.

"What you believe, I suppose, is atheism, isn't it?" she asked timorously.

"If that's what you want to call it," he laughed.

So, from now on Lilly was an atheist, one of those who in the eyes of the Church were roasting in nethermost hell. But if excommunication did not drive him to despair, she, too, could suffer it. She would even endure a Fatherless condition.

Her one regret was for St. Joseph.

Although he had not entered her thoughts for many a day, none the less it was a pity never again to be able to run to him in sorrow or joy, never, at least, without having to feel ashamed of herself, and that exactly at a time when she needed him so urgently, when her experiences fairly overwhelmed her with their force and number.

She felt a desire to be lulled and calmed, and the lofty art that Konrad spread before her eyes by no means soothed her; rather, it goaded her on, though, to be sure, to fresh delights.

They went to what few concerts the late season still offered, and heard the Eroica and Brahms' Second Symphony and an unutterably exquisite production by Grieg.

They would take their stand in the cheaper part of the house, where they both delighted to be, and listen with the backs of their hands touching as if by chance. A slight pressure conveyed the feelings awakened by some subtle charm or expressive bit.

What wonderful hours those were!

And what wonderful hours when she sat at Konrad's side in the pit (where none of the "crew" could see her). As she learned to know Shakespeare's characters belonging to every age and time and Wagner's luminous fairy-tale realism, she understood fully how infinitely poor her previous life had been.

He took her to see the moderns also.

Of all the plays Rosmersholm affected her most.

She, Lilly, with her secret guilt, was Rebecca. He in his unsuspicious purity was Rosmer. His high-pitched spirituality had an increasingly strong influence on her, as Rosmer's on Rebecca. But if the filth of her existence should gradually roll from her upon him, would she not be his evil demon, his ruination?

The thought was intolerable. She wept so bitterly during the performance as to attract general attention, and Konrad offered to take her out. She indignantly repudiated the suggestion.

On going home she staggered along the river side, still sobbing. He had chosen that way because it was darker and quieter, and he half carried her on his arm.

On the SpreebrÜcke she stopped and stared down into the dark, living depths. He let her have her way, but when she began to climb up on the railing—to see what it was like—he forced her down from the precarious position.

"What's the difference?" she thought. "When he finds it all out, I'll have to go down there after all—and alone."

From that evening on the effort to keep him free of the slightest suspicion as long, as long as possible troubled her more than ever, occupied her thoughts every moment of the day.

Her great ignorance caused her no shame—nevertheless she fought against it with all her might—but she lived in constant terror that the slovenly, cynical tone to which she had gradually habituated herself through long intercourse with the "crew," might crop out in her conversation.

The bit of carefully cherished rigour and good-breeding which she fetched out from among the remnants of her former spiritual state did her sluggish being good. And so she acquired some of that "grandeur" which she had demanded of herself at the beginning of her relations with Konrad. This time, however, it was not empty affectation, but an inner quality, a natural outcome of the finest and tenderest feelings, which she might still call her own.

Much that had long dominated her thoughts became unintelligible to her, especially the tendency caught from her friends, to transfer everything entering the circle of her thoughts to the realm of the erotic.

In astonishment she beheld world upon world opening up beyond the narrow whirlpool in which she had been carried around and around. Such a wealth of great and beautiful things to taste and enjoy was suddenly spread before her, that she did not find the time to feel ashamed of what had been.

But when she recalled how she had once dared to kiss him, shame ran hot through her body. That moment of wild abandon, she feared, might ever remain a stain upon his image of her.

Yet there was not the slightest indication that he did not think of her with the same respect as she of him. This mutual esteem always hung between them like a gauze veil, obscuring the beloved man's face as behind a mist of mingled happiness and anxiety, though at the same time removing the sting of self-reproach from Lilly.

They were never more to talk of love. Love gave way to a sweet, fraternal, though somewhat constrained relationship. The word "friendship" was frequently on their lips. They praised its hallowing force with a most serious mien, as if they had not the faintest notion of what it meant.

It was difficult, however, for Lilly to endure Konrad's bodily proximity. The one caress he permitted himself was to lay his arm lightly on her shoulder when they sat side by side. Though Lilly then longed to press closer up to him she finally moved farther away, because the constriction of her breast mounted by degrees to veritable torture.

She never ventured in the very slightest to think that some day he might become her lover. When unable to fall asleep, she pictured herself drowsing off with her head under his shoulder—that was bliss enough.

Her fancies scarcely ever strayed into forbidden territory. The chastity of her maiden days, which the colonel's senile greed had rudely violated, once again laid its merciful veil about her tremulous soul. In fact it was all as in the long-forgotten days of her girlhood—the golden wealth of thoughts and sensations, the witching glamour about each little object, the delightful importance of the tiniest incidents, the hopeful disquiet hoping for she knew not what.

If only there had been a single human being in whom to confide her joy and fears, her happiness would have been complete.

The desire waxed so strong within her as to be nearly uncontrollable. She had found herself more than once on the brink of telling her secrets to Richard—a quick way of ending them.

One day she decided to visit her former landlady and acquaint her with her great experience.

The old friendship between Mrs. Laue and Lilly had never wholly died down. Though they saw little of each other, Lilly had kept herself alive in the old lady's memory by sending messages and little gifts.

The tenant pro tem. of the "best room" opened the door for Lilly.

Mrs. Laue, as always, was sitting at her long white work table tapping busily with her wet finger-tips now on a pressed flower, now on a gluey bit of paper. She did not suffer herself to be interrupted, not even when Lilly on taking a seat beside her pushed toward her the sweets she never failed to bring.

"No, thanks, child," said Mrs. Laue. "Each bite more is one flower less. People like myself have to wait for a holiday before we can eat. We have nobody to provide for us and keep us like a princess. I'd like to be in your shoes just one day before I lie in my grave—go out walking early in the morning—with nothing to do but feed a couple of gold fish."

"As if that were happiness," sighed Lilly.

"Do you mean to complain of your lot?" cried Mrs. Laue indignantly. "If I were in your place, I'd thank the Lord every hour of the day for having sent me such a friend."

"Do you think that would satisfy all your hopes?"

"Why, what else do you want?" Mrs. Laue—ceaselessly tapping—rebuked her. "He can't marry you any more—that's out of the question. Besides marriage would be nasty after all you've gone through. But listen to me. Be careful! If you always behave yourself nicely, he will make you an allowance, and you'll have something to live on all your life."

"So, I'm just to aim for an old age pension?"

"Well, what else?"

"I can conceive of many other objects in life."

"What? Work? Try it. See what it's like after you've been nothing but emotions for years. Or take another lover? Then you'd be sure of a fine time. Let me tell you one thing, child; never for a single instant think of another man. If you were to do that, you'd deserve to paste flowers like me—sixteen hours a day—until you die."

While incessantly pasting one flower after the other, she poured out a volume of well-intentioned admonitions.

Lilly rose shivering.

There was nothing to be hoped for from that quarter. She looked about her with a sudden feeling of estrangement.

"I'll never come back here again," she thought.

The next morning the uneasy desire to open up her heart and obtain counsel again awoke, even stronger and more tormenting than before. Her friend Jula occurred to Lilly.

To be sure, the clever, hot-blooded little woman had held herself aloof from the crew's jaunts. Her friends had not the least idea of what she was doing, and her red-head, when appealed to, became reticent. But Lilly felt sure Mrs. Jula would not withhold the bit of comprehending sympathy she needed.

It took Lilly a long time to find her.

The coquettish yellow silk nest her red-head had fixed up for her near the "Linden" was empty.

Mrs. Jula had migrated to a suburb, the porter informed Lilly. She had thought the neighbourhood too dangerous; which made no sense, because the street was never empty, day or night.

Lilly smiled. The porter gave her the address, and she drove out to Mrs. Jula.

In a little bosky corner where the poets and philosophers dwell, Lilly found a very sober little house, brimful of books and manuscripts and busts of eminent men.

Mrs. Jula seemed to have undergone a great change. She no longer wore her curly hair in a disorderly pompadour about her forehead, but smoothly parted and drawn down over her ears. This gave her a disquieting touch of virtuousness, although that way of wearing the hair was just then the height of fashion in the very world in which virtue for esthetic reasons has little value.

Though she came to meet Lilly, as always, with outstretched arms, her cordiality seemed not wholly genuine; and though she beamed with delight at seeing her friend again, her expression was somewhat distraught, as if she were holding much in reserve.

"Without asking Lilly about herself or paying any attention to her appearance, Mrs. Jula burst into an account of her own affairs.

"You'll be tremendously surprised, but I can't help it," she said. "I never kept my little scruples of conscience a secret from you—they were really superfluous—my sins had never been so dreadful—"

"Hm, hm," thought Lilly.

"So you shall be the first of our former circle—"

"Former?" thought Lilly.

"—to learn of my return to a decent existence. Well, not to beat about the bush, I'm going to get married."

"Your red-head?" asked Lilly, happy and sympathetic.

"Well, not exactly." Mrs. Jula regarded her finger-tips with a condescending smile. "My red-head has given me his blessings, but that ends his rÔle."

"Then who is he?" asked Lilly, struggling to overcome her bewilderment.

Now Mrs. Jula hung back a bit after all.

"You see, it's a long story," she said hesitatingly. "To understand it thoroughly you'd have to know more of the circumstances of the past two years of my life. Did you ever happen to hear of an authoress by the name of Clarissa vom Winkle?"

Lilly recalled having seen the name in puritanic family sheets, which she had looked through in cafÉs and confectionery shops.

"Now listen: that Clarissa vom Winkle, who won a very acceptable reputation for championing the cause of simple, bourgeois morality as against the pernicious new-fashioned ideas of love—that Clarissa vom Winkle am I."

Lilly was too strongly under the spell of her own fate properly to appreciate the humour of Mrs. Jula's avowal. Just a glimmering suspicion dawned upon her mind of the monstrous farce we human beings figure in at life's bidding.

"Now on that account you're not to think me a convert or a bigot or something of the sort," Mrs. Jula continued with a certain little air of dignity, which became her as well as her quondam cordial cynicism. "There never was a special Day of Damascus in my life. I've always had, as it were, two souls in my breast; the one which—" she hesitated a moment—"well, which you know; and another which craves self-restraint and white damask and so on. That's the reason your unsuspicious loyalty always impressed me so, my dear. You probably recollect that I urged you to cling to your loyalty through thick and thin, because—you can't deny it—it's the crown of a woman's life. That's just what I said. Do you remember?"

Lilly was unable to recall such sentiments, but she did recall many others scarcely harmonising with them. She began to feel quite uneasy. Her friend's new conception of life seemed ill adapted for a source of peace to her in the joyful stress that had led her to seek sympathy with Mrs. Jula.

"Well, to continue," said the little lady. "I was always able to sell my essays and novels quickly, especially if I took them to the editors myself, and I found I was on the road to accumulating a tidy capital. My red-head became little more than an ornament. That's the beautiful thing about virtue. For the person who understands it, it is much more lucrative than sin." She ran her little red tongue over her lips in her knowing way, but maintained a perfectly demure face. "And then it was in disposing of my works that I met my husband to be. You know—I'm at last divorced from that old horror up there. This one is the editor of a new magazine for women. It stands for quiet domesticity and already has very good advertisements. He's a man of great intellectual gifts, and very firm moral principles, which, I suppose you've noticed, have not remained without influence on me."

She made a little double chin and folded her hands in her lap.

"And how did you manage to separate from—your old friend?" asked Lilly, from whose mind all these curious facts had almost driven her own concerns.

"Separate? What are you thinking of?" rejoined Mrs. Jula, beaming again with sunny foolishness. "I wouldn't be as heartless as all that. Even if I did say his rÔle had ended, you're not to take it so literally. What's the poor dyspeptic fellow to do if I refuse to set a place for him at my table now and then? Why do you look so surprised, Lilly? Something of the sort can always be managed. In the first place, I swore to my betrothed that my red-head had never been more to me than a brotherly friend. All of us women swear such things and don't even blush."

Lilly nodded thoughtfully. That evening, had Konrad demanded it, she would have sworn an oath without a moment's hesitation.

"In the second place—I'm telling you this in confidence—he contributed a considerable sum toward establishing the magazine. So the two gentlemen are partners. I arranged matters that way intentionally, because it seemed to me the best guarantee of a continuance of all-around friendly relations. Don't make such large eyes, dearie. Life is made up of compromises. Every bird feathers its nest. And if you think I'm afraid of disclosures, I shrug my shoulders. Tragedy is a matter of taste. I don't like it. So it doesn't exist for me. I always say to myself: you must wear a smile on your brow, but beneath the smile your brow must be of iron."

Lilly experienced a sickish sensation.

"If that's the price to pay for uprooting tragedy from one's life," she thought, "then I'd rather have unhappiness—I can swallow it—than all this happiness."

She rose.

No matter how high above her this woman towered in force of intellect and will, no matter how firmly she stood on the ground of virtuous life, she was no longer suited to be Lilly's friend.

"I sincerely hope you will never be mistaken in your confidence," said Lilly.

Mrs. Jula threw up her hand contemptuously.

"Bah," she said, "those men! A man who knows the world is a woman eater, and your 'pure' man is a simpleton. I can always get along with both classes."

"There may be a third class," said Lilly, irritated, as if Konrad had been insulted.

"Possibly," rejoined Mrs. Jula, shrugging her shoulders. "I've never come across it." Then putting both hands on Lilly's waist: "Tell me, child, perfectly frankly: if you look at me this way and compare me with what I used to be, does it seem to you that I'm posing?"

"To be quite candid," Lilly admitted, "it seemed to me so at first."

Mrs. Jula sighed.

"It's very hard to adapt your figure to a dress that wasn't made for you. Everybody has a certain moral ambition, the so-called non-moral person most of all. But there's one thing I'd love to know: what is really the more valuable in me, my former sinning or my present virtue."

She smiled up at Lilly with a melancholy yet sly expression.

This time Lilly did not respond. Beyond that complacent little scatterbrain her own happiness rose lofty and threatening as a storm-cloud.

When out on the street the feeling of restless isolation took stronger hold of her than ever. Yet she was glad she had not spoken. She knew that if she had held up her beloved's picture to Mrs. Jula's sly understanding, it would have come back to her desecrated.

Now there was actually not a soul to whom she could pour out her heart.

A few days later in glancing over the paper, as was her daily habit, her eyes were caught by a sentence which suddenly sent a ray of light into her soul: "St. Joseph's Chapel—MÜllerstrasse—evening services," and so on.

Then her old, long-forgotten friend was still alive. He even possessed his own church here in cold, heretical Berlin.

In all the years she had been in Berlin she had not entered a church. After having seated herself among the Protestants at Miss von Schwertfeger's advice, she had felt she was a renegade, and had not ventured to seek solace in religion.

And now she was an atheist.

But the name St. Joseph in the paper warmed her heart. She felt as one who has wandered long in foreign lands and suddenly among a throng of strangers beholds a dear face from home.

Now she knew to whom to turn without fear of having to depart misunderstood and unheard. Even if the great scholars had done away with him a thousand times, he still existed for her stupid, surcharged heart, ready to receive the confession of her happiness.

MÜllerstrasse was somewhere on the extreme north side, "somewhere around Franz-Josephs-Land," her green grocer, to whom she had applied, informed her.

She went through a maze of streets, from one electric tram to another—past the Reichtags buildings, the Lessing theatre, and the Stettin station—along the endless chaussÉ. Beyond the Weddingplatz, which the Berlinese consider the end of the world, was where MÜllerstrasse began.

Nobody had the slightest notion of where a St. Joseph's chapel was, not even dwellers in the immediate vicinity. Finally somebody remembered seeing "a Catholic something or other," and Lilly at last found the object of her search.

A low frame structure which might have been taken for a barn, and some blossoming trees set between towering tenements.

The side door was open. Pine wreaths said "Welcome." Lilly saw a simple white hall permeated with the sepulchral smell of incense, laurel, and freshly cut pine, and in the background a niche decorated to resemble the starry heavens. Beyond the wooden balustrade separating the pictureless shrine of the high altar from the hall, rose two glorious palms. The low rumble of an organ came from the choir. The organist had probably stayed after the funeral to dream a bit.

In suspense Lilly's glance glided along the walls in search of her saint's abiding place. Was he smiling and holding up his finger here, too, with the same benevolent, threatening manner as the good old uncle in St. Anne's?

There was no place for side altars. The space was completely filled with benches. But that large picture there in the garish frame, with a console-table beneath covered with dusty bouquets—

She saw it—and started in terror.

Her saint, her dear, beloved saint, was simply ridiculous.

He had a sharp-nosed, wax-doll face with a golden yellow beard and eyes cast down in pious modesty, and he was smiling mawkishly. The infant Jesus clad in pink triumphed on his left arm, while his right arm gently clasped a spray of lilies.

Lilly's disgust turned into pity.

How remote, how inconceivably remote, was that world in which one implored St. Josephs for signs of favour.

Could it be that her good, true monitor in St. Anne's had been just as comical?

Perish the thought. He should not be, he must not be so absurd. There must be one place to which one's memory could travel homeward in hours of pleasant mourning.

The organ was playing the prelude of a beautiful mass by Scarlatti, which Lilly well knew from of old. Gradually she began to feel at ease.

She kneeled on the last bench, closed her eyes, and tried to imagine that instead of that blond caricature, her old friend was looking down upon her.

A saying of St. Thomas Aquinas occurred to her, which she remembered from her Sunday school lessons: "God has granted other saints the power to help us in certain circumstances; to St. Joseph he has granted the power to help us whatever our need."

Once he had been so powerful in her life.

She spoke to him across the hundreds of miles and hundreds of years that separated her from the altar in St. Anne's—the last time on earth, she was fully aware. There was no longer place in her soul for such childishness. And just because it was her farewell, she told him without reserve of her great experience—how infinitely happy she now was—how everything that had lain dead within her blossomed forth with fresh life—and how the entire universe was one great symphony of joy.

And she told him of the monstrous deception she was practising, and her fear of discovery—and the sweet, impatient tremour for which there could be no image or name.

Then she told him she no longer believed in him in the least—she had become an "atheist."

Then, reconciled, she laid the carnations she had brought along for the poor out-of-the-way saint among the dusty bouquets and left with lightened heart, smiling at the spring which smiled upon her.

Beside this Lilly, whom the stormy wind of her new life bore aloft to the heavens far above all earthly hindrances, a second Lilly lived, who spent every other evening with her old friends, and was the marvel of her circle, because of her triumphant mood, her merry wit, the youthful liveliness of an awakening intellect.

When Richard came for his afternoon tea, he met with daily surprises. In place of the dragging gloom, which had long coloured her days, he found sprightliness and activity, a creature of novelties never still an instant. Though now and then abashed at his inability to keep pace with her, he gladly accustomed himself to this side of her being, and praised the magical qualities of the hÆmatogen which the physician had prescribed that spring instead of the usual iron.

The same scene was enacted each evening that Richard wanted to take Lilly out. At first she pleaded a cold or said she was not in the mood for meeting people. But once she had consented and was in the swing, she played with her admirers as with puppies, and awed the ladies by telling them things to their faces. Sometimes, to be sure, she sat as formerly, absorbed in dreamy silence, though now, if anyone attempted to liven her up, she no longer blushed and suffered herself to be teased without an attempt at self-defence. She paid back every intruder with such prompt, haughty satire that the men soon found it wiser to leave her to herself.

In all this time she drank herself into a state of exaltation only once, and that on the day on which—at last!—she decided to tell Richard of the existence of her new friend.

She had wrestled with herself for two months. Sometime or other it had to be, she knew; for what if they were seen together! But since she could not decide in what form to clothe the avowal, she had deferred it from day to day.

Chance helped her out of the dilemma. One day Richard, in order to obtain her judgment, brought along some sketches of vases which had been submitted to him for purchase. On leaving he forgot to take them along. Konrad happened to see them, and in a few rapid strokes drew the outline which corresponded to the original draught, and which the artist in developing the plan had failed to insert.

The next day when Richard saw the work he looked at Lilly in astonishment. The corrections were splendid—who had made them?

Lilly, still suffering from the intimidation induced by her bungled work on the transparencies, did not dare to tell him she herself had. So taking heart she said:

"My teacher, who's giving me lessons in the history of art."

"Since when, I'd like to know?" asked Richard, his eyes growing round and severe.

In her great embarrassment she took to scolding as best—or as worst—she knew how.

"Do you think I can stand such a dull, inane, idle existence? Do you think it's a crime for an unoccupied young woman to strive for a bit of culture? Don't you think I'd be a better friend if I could keep pace with you and other clever people than if I go to my ruin jabbering a lot of nonsense and dressing myself up for show and behaving like any silly thing?"

The turn about "clever people" flattered him.

"All very well and good," he replied more mildly, "but why didn't you tell me before?"

She concocted a long story.

About three months before she had read an advertisement in the Lokalanzeiger in which a young scholar offered his services to gentlemen and ladies possessed of a thirst for knowledge. She wrote to the scholar, he came, and the lessons began. Pupil and teacher had grown to be friends. Though their friendship, of course, was of a purely ideal nature, she dreaded awakening Richard's jealousy; so she had decided not to tell him until time should prove beyond the shadow of a doubt the absolute purity of her endeavours.

He wrinkled his forehead, and a cunning grin, inexplicable to Lilly, played about his mouth.

"So your friend's a young scholar?" he asked. His eyes twinkled, and he looked at her sidewise, his head inclined entirely to the left.

"Yes."

"He's going to be Privatdozent, I suppose?"

"He's not quite certain, but he probably will."

"And I suppose he's highly intellectual and scintillating and superior?"

She turned her eyes heavenward.

"I've never in my life met a man who—" She stopped in fright. It was scarcely the better part of wisdom to give reins to her enthusiasm.

"Hm, hm," he said, as one who finds long harboured suspicions confirmed. His face was quite red, and he gnawed the ends of his moustache.

"I knew it!" cried Lilly. "You're jealous after all."

She felt as if a bitter injustice were being done her.

He said nothing more, and left lowering.

An hour later a package from Messrs. Liebert & Dehnicke was left at the door.

Lilly opened it and found it contained a man's suit, which she recognised as one Richard had frequently worn the previous summer.

A letter accompanied the package.

"Dearest Lilly:—

As I promised you that time, I shall always be ready to come to the assistance of your affinities with old clothes. To further their progress I shall also be glad to provide them with old boots.

You see how jealous I am.

Your Richard."

In the exuberance of her delight Lilly drank to excess that evening. Never—not even when she had danced for Dr. Salmoni—had she allowed her imitative faculties such full play. She was in a state of mad self-abandon.

In conclusion she danced on the tops of the tables set close together, a wild Salome dance, which had just then come into fashion.

Between her clenched teeth she zimmed strange oriental melodies.

"What's that she's mumbling?" the spectators asked.

Later they put the question to her.

But she had lost her senses. She was unconscious.