Not till the evening, when Frau Asmussen's soothing medicine claimed her attention, was peace restored. The sisters were now at liberty to take more walks, only their sense of propriety forbade them to go out at so late an hour.
"Anyone who met us now would take us for fast girls," they said, "and then it would be all up with marrying."
Indeed, it was hardly credible how many were the rules and restrictions by which these young ladies ordered their apparently unlicensed method of life.
You might be kissed, but on no account must you return kisses. Men might address you by your Christian name and call you "du" in conversation, but to write in the same familiar strain would be an unpardonable insult. You would allow a man to pay for your coffee and cakes, but not for your bread-and-butter. A stranger might press your foot under the table, but should he squeeze your hand you must instantly rise, and so forth.
Lilly had not the slightest comprehension what all these pros and cons meant. Man in the abstract for her, up till now, had been merely a part of existence that had no separate individuality--that passed her in the streets without attracting her notice in the least. The only men she had admired were those who existed in her dreams, in her novels, and imagination. The creature that stared at her from the pavement, that came to get books and found ridiculous excuses for starting conversations with her, that held aside the baize curtain at the church door for her to go out, that smiled over the counter in shops--this creature was something stupid, contemptible, scarcely tolerable, to whom she was utterly indifferent, and to give a thought to whom would be degrading.
She was now to learn that a girl could exist solely for the sake of that gross, coarse thing called "man," that she could think of nothing but him from the moment she got up till the time she went to bed, as if she were created for him, and must put him before her work and faith and God.
Though Lilly knew that she was far above being influenced by the two girls' example and precepts, she could not help feeling a slight curiosity awake within her to learn more of what these creatures were like who caused such a flutter in the dovecot of feminine emotions, whose approval was so keenly to be sought, and whose coldness meant absolute annihilation.
A nervous dread began to torment her about that unknown vortex of wickedness outside, from which dirt was now brought every day and laid at her threshold, and about the timid curiosity that it aroused within her. Whether she would or not, her thoughts were always recurring to the panorama of pictures, painted in vivid poisonous colours and unrolled before her nightly by the two degenerate sisters. It was quite a relief when the hot friendship, after a month's duration, began to cool.
The coolness was caused by an unaccountable deficit, which occurred not once, but many times, in the cash-box, and became a standing mystery. Lilly, in a fever, added up the figures. She counted every pfennig over and over again; at last she was forced to conclude that someone had taken advantage of her absence for a moment to open the drawer and dip into the cash-box.
She knew that she would be accused of the theft when it was discovered, so, in order to save herself, she took the key of the drawer with her when she left the room, as if by accident. She repeated the ruse several times till she was certain that she was on the right track, by the change of manner in the girls, who regarded her with increasing scorn and displeasure.