"Only see," said the girl, lifting her dark shawl; "she did not even leave me a respectable dress: if it had not been for the shawl that the landlady lent me, I should have been ashamed to go across the street."
And it was really so; she wore a simple sack of striped cotton under her black covering, that she carefully wrapped about her again. But now it began to look as though she no longer troubled herself in the least about the adventure that had so recently made her weep. The pale little face that she turned toward her neighbor, brightly illuminated by the lantern, had even lost its expression of anger at this insulting treatment and betrayal of friendship, and beamed again with light-heartedness and irrepressible enjoyment.
"And what are you going to do, Zenz?"
"I don't know yet. I shall manage to find some place to stay at. I could go to the Rochus garden, or the Neusigl, where I lodged when I first came here; but the waiters there have keys to the doors, and I have found that it is not safe there. And anywhere else, where I am not known, they might think that I would not be able to pay for the room, and I really have no money but a few kreutzers. I should have to pawn the ring that I have from my poor dead mother. Well, the day is not over yet, and I can think the matter over again."
"To be sure," continued she, after a pause, during which Felix sat, as if in a dream, gazing at her red lips and her white teeth, that one could have counted when she spoke, "to be sure, I might fare well enough if I only would! So well, that that false black cat Pepi would envy me."
"If you only would, Zenz?"
"Yes, if I were willing to be wicked!" she added, in a low tone, and for a moment her face grew serious. But in the next instant she laughed merrily again, as if she would laugh away the flush that had suffused her face.
"Do you know an artist named Rossel?"
"Certainly. Edward Rossel. What of him?"
"He came to see me about a week ago. He said he had seen the figure that Herr Jansen modeled from me, and he said, if I would come to him and stand as a model, he would pay me three times as well for it."