Frau Asmussen shook her head reproachfully, and fetched down the book required from an upper shelf. He clutched it eagerly, without heeding in the least the glance of warning with which the old lady handed it to him.
"You see, my dear," she said when he had gone, "that's how the young go to perdition, and I am condemned to help them on the way."
"Why?" asked Lilly.
"Do you know how a chemist's shop is arranged?"
Lilly said she had often been in one, but couldn't remember.
"One place is marked 'Poison,'" her employer went on, "and in it are kept the most deadly poisons known to humanity. On that account the door is kept locked, and no one may touch the contents save the chemist and his assistants. Now, just look round; half these books are poison, too. Nearly everything that's written in these days is pernicious trash, and lures the reader on to destruction. Yet I am bound to keep these books, bound to distribute them, though my heart is wrung as I hand them over the counter. My undutiful daughters are an example. They read, read--did nothing but read the whole night through; and when they were stuffed full of impudence and nonsense, they turned up their noses at the food I gave them and the cooking, and went out for walks, till at last they sneaked off to their father--that miserable worm! that swindler and scum! with his face all out in pimples! I warn you, my child, against that man. Should you ever meet him, gather up your skirts as I am doing now, to avoid contamination."
Lilly shuddered at the account of this vile monster in human shape, and was happy that she had found a protectress in his deserving wife.
An hour or so later they sat down to supper, which consisted of milk pudding and slices of bread and dripping. Lilly, unused to anything but the simplest fare, was easily persuaded that no milk puddings in the world were as delicious as Frau Asmussen's, and that the Kaiser himself could not sit down to a more daintily prepared meal than was spread on her table. She missed, it is true, the slice of ham which she had been given every night at the hospital; if this had been added, her supper would have seemed the acme of gastronomic delights.
More enjoyment awaited her when she went to bed. The library was part of a big room with three windows, which was divided into four compartments by two long bookcases running from the wall where the windows were, and by a counter opposite the door that communicated with the entrance, and thus there was only one narrow gangway to connect one compartment with another. At bed-time Frau Asmussen carried into the furthest compartment two forms, on which she laid a mattress and made up a bed. The space was so confined and filled up that Lilly had to jump over a bench at the foot of her improvised bed to get into it, and she thought this great fun. She fell asleep wedged in between two high upright bookcases, the window above her head, a chair beside her on which her things were piled, and "The Song of Songs" clasped in her arms.
The next morning she was initiated into her duties as librarian. She learnt the system by which the thousands of volumes were arranged on the shelves, and as she knew her alphabet she would have mastered it in five minutes, and been able to fetch any of the popular books from their places, if Frau Asmussen had followed her own system, instead of placing the books anyhow and so courting confusion and muddle. A worse task was to find the names of books and authors in the general catalogue, and entries of customers in the ledger, which were also supposed to be alphabetical; but the carelessness of Frau Asmussen and her daughters had reduced the whole to chaos. Lilly set to work with burning zeal to put things in order, and for several weeks the attainment of this desired goal was her sole object in life.