She listened eagerly, yet as her days passed thus a feeling of depression grew--almost imperceptibly. She felt herself sinking into this sordid groove, and a feeling of repulsion took possession of her for the narrow-minded creature in whose great moist red-rimmed eyes still lingered a hope for an unattainable happiness, though her lamp-shade drudgery had brought her nearly to the brink of the grave. This repulsion was often so powerful that she was compelled to rush out; she didn't care where so long as it was out into the world, into life. She did not stay long; in an hour or less she was back again. The streets frightened her. The painted women who jostled her, the bold, adventurous youths who followed on her heels, the callous indifference with which everyone elbowed his way through the hurly-burly--all this scared and made a coward of her. A gloomy foreboding told her that she would never regain her self-reliant joy in combat. When she compared what she was now with the little shopgirl who gave out Frau Asmussen's trashy volumes in sheltered security, confident that she was doing her duty and always in the right, even when beaten for telling lies and obviously in the wrong, she felt she was a helpless straw drifting on the waters. Then this waiting, waiting; this sleepless, hungry waiting! What for? She did not know herself. But something must happen. She could not exist for ever among these snippets of oiled paper, live and die making lamp-shades. Sometimes the thought of Walter's rich manufacturer of bronze wares cropped up in her mind with a longing which had to be suppressed. She was alarmed to find herself clinging to this shadow, and chased it away. A year had passed since that letter of introduction was written. It would be far too late to avail herself of it now. So she went on waiting. Often as she undressed and caught the reflection of herself in the glass, her form consecrated by beauty, round and slender limbed, her long-lashed wistful eyes, her ripe mouth shaped for kisses, she would be seized with glad ecstasy, and say to herself, "Am I like that?" And then she would revel in a sense of her youth and readiness for love. Then the whole world seemed there for no other object than to press her to its heart. Then this dreary round of drudgery was a good thing in disguise, for it was bracing her up for flights of intoxicating enjoyment. When she stretched herself on the sofa at dusk to rest, and she saw the blue flash made by the electric tramcars flit across the ceiling, blissful dreams stole upon her and transformed that burning fever of expectancy into half-fulfilled delights; a feeling of having been saved rose like a thanksgiving in her soul, and what she had been bewailing as lost happiness became nothing but a nightmare from which she was grateful to be relieved. But these moods were rare, and they resembled the mirage of thirsty travellers rather than the refreshing waters.