Helène began to realize that finding a situation might take a much longer time than she had expected. She, therefore, decided to leave the expensive hotel and take a room at a modest pension. She was soon accommodated and spent her days mainly in reading and answering the advertisements in the daily papers and the “Teacher’s Journal.” On two occasions she received replies requesting her to call, but nothing came of her visits—she could give no references. She persevered, however, convinced that something would turn up some day.
The days lengthened and the snow had disappeared altogether from the streets. In the park, where she loved to take her walks on sunny afternoons, the keepers were busy cleaning up the grass plots and planting flowers. The trees were beginning to burst into foliage; the leaf buds of the lindens were swelling; the birches began to show their pretty little pussy-tails and the sparrows and starlings were twittering their first spring songs. The faces of the people she met took on expectant and hopeful expressions.
One beautiful, sunny morning she received a letter from a Frau Professor Heimbach, asking her to call in response to her application for a governess for her two children. The Frau Professor lived on the second floor in Hegel Strasse.
Helène had no doubt she had at last succeeded in getting what she had been hoping for. She was so overjoyed that, for the first time in months, she sang while eating her breakfast. She arrayed herself in her best clothes and set out looking the very incarnation of the lovely spring weather.
Hegel Strasse looked like the very place in which a Frau Professor might live. It was in a very respectable neighborhood and the house itself a faded remnant of a one-time dignified and imposing structure.
With a beating heart Helène ascended the unadorned, cold stairway and pulled the bell-knob below the brass-plate which indicated that Professor Albert V. Heimbach, Ph.D., lived within. She could hear in the distance the shrill tinkling sound of the bell. After what seemed to her an eternity the door opened and an unkempt maid with a red upturned nose appeared. To Helène’s request to see the Frau Professor, the servant made no reply, but looked her over very carefully from head to feet. The inspection appeared to be satisfactory, for the girl nodded and beckoned to Helène to come in.
At the end of the narrow entresol and sharply outlined against the bright light which came from a distant room, Helène saw a tall, slender woman approaching.
“What is it you wish, Madame?” she inquired of Helène.
Helène explained that she had come in response to the Frau Professor’s advertisement for a governess.
“Come into the room, and be seated.”