"If you didn't waste so much time over every little bunch of flowers," said Frau Laue, who shared honestly with Lilly the proceeds of their joint labours, "you might earn more than I do."
But Lilly was content with the forty or fifty marks a month that her work brought in. Her new craze for lamp-shade making led her on to higher aims. The dried grasses, or grass flowers, as Frau Laue called them, specially took her fancy. Their slender graceful stalks, the delicacy of their veinings, the melancholy charm with which they drooped, reminded her of little forest trees, weeping willows beside brooks, ashes bending over marble tombs, or palms waving yearning fronds on torrid rocks.
She dreamt of starting a new kind of art. She would paint on transparent plaques of glass with dried grass foregrounds. She would paint lamp-shades and window-blinds with woods of flowering grass and ferns, with little cottages in relief, with their doors and windows cut out as if light were shining from inside; fleecy clouds, pink sunsets, lines of misty hills, dark-blue rivers in which the moon was reflected, building across them bridges of light.
The pictures succeeded each other in her brain with inexhaustible fecundity; there seemed no end to them. It was difficult to know where to begin with such a vast wealth of ideas at one's disposal.
Frau Laue, who had been pasting her oil paper in exactly the same way for twenty years, had a horror of innovations, and warned Lilly to stick to her last. But a demon of inventiveness possessed Lilly. One day she made a tremendous coup. She took her arrow-shaped brooch set with six small emeralds to a jeweller, who gave her eighty marks for it--needless to say, the brooch was worth five times as much--and purchased on her way home after the transaction several cut-glass plaques, held together in pairs by screws, so that they could be easily attached to the window-panes. She also invested in a paint-box, and while Frau Laue clasped her hands in dismay to her head, Lilly set to work gallantly. But her practical knowledge of art had no foundation except in the memory of a few water-colour lessons at school, and it failed her utterly. The colours ran into each other, and the woods in the foreground would not look as if they had anything to do with the landscape behind, but remained simply grasses straggling about objectlessly.
For a long time Lilly struggled to gain her effects, then, crying bitterly, she threw the rubbish into a corner, and returned sorrowfully to lamp-shades again.
Frau Laue, who had sulked and scarcely spoken during the weeks of Lilly's apostacy, began once more to make plans and to build castles in the air for her. All the wild schemes that for the last twenty years had taken shape in her poor brain were now, when she had no hope of maturing them for herself, freely poured into Lilly's outstretched palm.
She listened eagerly, yet as her days passed thus a feeling of depression grew--almost imperceptibly. She felt herself sinking into this sordid groove, and a feeling of repulsion took possession of her for the narrow-minded creature in whose great moist red-rimmed eyes still lingered a hope for an unattainable happiness, though her lamp-shade drudgery had brought her nearly to the brink of the grave.
This repulsion was often so powerful that she was compelled to rush out; she didn't care where so long as it was out into the world, into life.
She did not stay long; in an hour or less she was back again. The streets frightened her. The painted women who jostled her, the bold, adventurous youths who followed on her heels, the callous indifference with which everyone elbowed his way through the hurly-burly--all this scared and made a coward of her.