Lilly remembered hazily having seen the name in certain old-fashioned and puritanical magazines for family reading, which she had glanced through for the sake of the pictures in cafés and confectioners' shops.
"Well, then, Clarissa von Winkel, who has gained quite a reputation as the champion of a sound domestic morality, as opposed to the dangerous modern ideas about free-love--that Clarissa von Winkel is myself."
Lilly was far too wrapped up in her own affairs to be able to bestow on the humour of these confessions the appreciation they merited, though she did experience a faint glimmer of amusement as she realised what strange pranks human puppets can be made to play in life's great farce.
"Now, don't go and jump to the conclusion that I am converted, and have become a prude and a canting bigot, or anything of the kind," Frau Jula went on, with a certain dignity of tone, which became her quite as well as her former outspoken cynicism. "There's been no Damascus in my career. I have always had, as you know, two selves. One ..." She hesitated a moment, "I needn't tell you what it was like.... The other craved for propriety, and white damask table-linen.... That is why you always attracted me so, my dearest Lilly. I couldn't help admiring your refined loyalty. Did I not always impress on you and urge you to hold fast, no matter in what circumstance you were placed, to this loyalty, which to us women is the crown of life? Don't you remember what a point I made of it?"
Lilly could not remember, but she remembered a good many other sentiments expressed by the lady at different times scarcely in accordance with it. Her friend's new outlook on the world seemed ill adapted to give her the sympathy she had come to seek in the joyous tumult of her present feelings.
"Well, to continue my story," Frau Jula said. "Through getting my articles and stories easily accepted, especially when I submitted them to editors in person, I found myself on the road to making a nice little fortune. My red-headed boy became merely a decorative appendage. For that is where virtue scores; it pays so much better than vice if you know the right way to set about it." There she slid her little tongue along her red lips, in her old arch manner, though her face remained immovably demure. "It was in the business of disposing of my work that I met my intended husband. I have got a divorce from the first brute at last.... He--this one--is the editor of a lady's paper just started, which caters for quiet domestic and housewifely tastes. It has got heaps of advertisements already. He is a man of high intellectual endowments and strictly moral principles, which, as you perceive, have not been without influence on myself."
So saying, she made a little double chin and folded her hands piously in her lap.
"And, if I may ask, how did you manage to break with your old friend?" questioned Lilly at length, almost forgetting her own trials in these extraordinary confidences.
"Break with him?... What are you talking about?" Jula answered suddenly, radiant again with foolish frivolity. "I couldn't be guilty of such heartlessness, and when I said just now that his rôle had ended, I didn't mean you to take it literally.... What on earth would the poor fellow do with his dyspeptic liver if I did not now and then invite him to a family dinner? In the first place, I have sworn solemnly to my future husband that my red-headed boy has never been anything more to me than a brother. Yes, we women can swear things like that, and not even blush in the process."
Lilly nodded thoughtfully. She, too, on a certain evening, would have taken any oath that had been desired of her.