Month after month went by. Fraeulein von Schwertfeger gave up writing. Want of money caused her little hoard of jewels to dwindle rapidly. The pensions she boarded in became more and more modest. Instead of Chilian attaches and Greek merchants, bankrupt auctioneers and clerks out of employment offered to cheer her evenings by forcing their company upon her; and the ladies who paid her visits in soiled tea-gowns glanced covetously at the few bracelets, brooches, and rings which she still had left. Thus she decided to end this mode of living and find a new one. CHAPTER II Among highly recommended "best rooms" in Berlin belonging to apartments which had known much-boasted "better days," and now were let for thirty marks a week, including breakfast and attendance, to respectable young gentlewomen, were those of the widow, Klothilde Laue. The furniture was upholstered in crimson plush, which had been the latest thing in decorations at the time of the Franco-Prussian war. There was a long mirror, the sides of which from top to bottom were fantastically plastered with new years' and birthday cards, and advertisements of soaps and powders. On the walls hung photographs of once famous actors, whose fame had meanwhile faded like the ink in which they had inscribed their autographs. The marble-topped washstand had an embroidered splasher bearing the following cryptic couplet: "If you would wash yourself clean, Take care that your conscience is pure." There were also endless photograph-albums, card-cases, a sandal-wood windmill meant to clip cigars, a green frosted glass punch-bowl, and a rickety pitch-pine bedstead, behind blue woollen curtains. Finally, to crown all, there hung over the sofa in a gilded glass case a mysterious globular-shaped creation, consisting of six plaited strands of tissue paper radiating from a common centre, and through its covering of gauze an ornamentation of pressed flowers was dimly discernible. In this best room of 10, Neanderstrasse, situated up four flights of stairs above a china shop, a piano business on the hire system, and a studio for repairs, Lilly landed one day, to look out from the window on the greenish-grey waters of the Engelbecken and a strip of Berlin's smoky sky. Frau Laue, an overworked, prematurely aged woman of fifty, with a face like a dried apple and great eyes that always looked tearful, revolved round her in incredulous admiration. She seemed unable to grasp that so much brilliance and beauty had positively strayed into her abode. On the day of her arrival Lilly heard her whole history. Her husband had been cashier and book-keeper at one of the most popular variety theatres in Berlin, but twenty years ago he had died, leaving her pensionless in an unfeeling world where no rosy stage glamour disguises solitary tears, and no comic patter stills the pangs of hunger.