"To speak the truth," Lilly confessed, "it did at first."
Frau Jula sighed, "It is difficult to grow accustomed to a dress which was not made for you.... Every one of us has a certain moral ambition; no one more than the so-called immoral person. But I would like to know one thing: whether my past sins or my present virtues are more to my credit."
She smiled up at Lilly with a melancholy but mischievous face.
Lilly answered nothing. Beyond this little self-satisfied madcap she saw rising her own fate, dark and threatening as a thunder-cloud.
When she was once more in the street, her restlessness and sense of isolation took stronger possession of her than before. And yet she was thankful that she had kept silent. She knew full well that if she had submitted the portrait of her beloved to Frau Jula's acute judgment it would have been returned to her desecrated. And now she faced the fact that there was absolutely no one left in whom she could confide.
A few days later, however, in glancing, as she was in the habit of doing, through the morning paper, her eye alighted on a passage that awoke a ray of hope in her soul:
"St. Joseph's Chapel, Müllerstrasse. Vespers and Benediction" at such-and-such an hour.
Her old, long-forgotten friend and counsellor was, then, still living! He had his own church, even here in cold hardhearted heretical Berlin. In all these years she had never entered a church. Since, acting on the advice of Fräulein von Schwertfeger, she had joined the Protestants in worship, she had regarded herself as an apostate from the true Church, and had not dared to seek solace in religion, and now she had become a regular infidel. Yet the sight of the name of St. Joseph in the paper touched a soft warm place in her heart.
Her feelings were as if, after long wanderings in foreign lands, she had suddenly caught sight in the alien crowd of a dear long-lost home face. Now she knew to whom she might turn, without any fear of being misunderstood and sent empty away. Even if the great philosophers had demolished him a thousand times over, he was still there, ready to receive the outpourings of her poor silly overflowing heart.