In her back parlour, with one window, which smelt of hay and paste, and where on a long white deal table lay in their hundreds and thousands the skeletons of floral denizens of the Thuringian Forest--she could not, of course, afford the time to gather them herself--she had drudged for nearly two decades, tapping, daubing, pasting, drying, and threading sixteen hours a day, and had earned, thanks to her reputation as a specialist, enough to enable her to let her best room--her treasure-trove and sanctuary--to a stranger for thirty marks a month.
The two did not long remain strangers, however.
Into the back-room existence of this downtrodden being, before whose eyes the pictures of a few bedizened ballet-girls shone and glittered as paragons of unattainable magnificence, Lilly descended from the real aristocracy like a heaven-born divinity. Her landlady idolised her as an emissary from regions that she had believed hitherto were only possible in fiction; where such expressions as "footman," "drawing-room," "pearl necklace"--Lilly took care to tell all about hers--came quite naturally instead of being rolled on the tongue and allowed slowly to melt as with closed eyes one conjured up the surroundings to which such a vocabulary belonged.
Frau Laue became in very early days Lilly's confidante and adviser. She helped her to live down the shame following her divorce, she cheered her when a feeling of desolation overcame her, and painted for her a future in radiant colours.
No one need perish in a great powerful miracle-working city like Berlin. Every day there were dozens of happy chances that might set you on your legs again. There were lonely old ladies dying to find someone to whom they could leave their money; there were aristocratic young ones who yearned to hold out a hand of sympathy and friendship to a poor, beautiful orphaned sister; there were famous artists who would gladly escape from the snares laid for them by female admirers in the arms of a good woman; and there were great poets with whom the post of muse was vacant. In fact, one of the greatest capitals in the world, it would appear, had only been waiting for Lilly's advent to lift her to its throne as conquering heroine.
Again the months passed. Regret for her wasted opportunities became gradually less acute. Her nights were calmer and no longer disturbed by this or that scene from her lost paradise rising before her vision with horrible clearness, when she was in a state between sleeping and waking, to make her start up and cry aloud.
One lesson, however, she had not learnt, and that was to estimate correctly how brief had been her sojourn in high places: she could not accept it as a mere episode that had interrupted the ordinary course of her real life like a capricious dream. In her inner consciousness she continued to be a kind of enchanted princess who, in the disguise of a beggar, went about unknown and unrecognised till such time as Divine dispensation should reinstate her and restore her lawful rights.
With anxious solicitude she clung to everything that reminded her of her vanished splendour. In Frau Lane's wardrobe she hung the festive raiment that the colonel had ordered for her in Dresden, Frau Lane's empty drawers were filled with the snowy fragrance of her coronet-embroidered underclothes, and in front of the big mirror in Frau Lane's best room were ranged the costly ivory and gold toilette articles, which once had proudly graced her dressing-table in the "boudoir." These, too, still bore the seven-pointed coronet, and to think of parting with them would have seemed an outrage to Lilly on her most sacred property. She stood waiting meanwhile for what the future would bring forth. She still studied advertisements and wrote letters applying for vacant situations, but very often forgot to post the letters.
For the sake of having something to do, and craving for companionship of some kind, she began to sit with Frau Laue in the back room and help her with her work. Soon she tapped, cut out, daubed, pasted, and plaited as diligently as her instructress, and as in her cradle she had been endowed with a gift and taste for all things artistic, she speedily excelled Frau Laue, who, when she returned from disposing of the lamp-shades, would relate without envy that the flower pattern Lilly had designed had been singled out for admiration, and that the shades she made were preferred to her own.
Her ambition was aroused. She strove to produce works of art, and never tired of toiling for this end.