It had become a matter of habit to go out somewhere of an evening three or four times a week, and Lilly quickly got to know every pleasure in the Berlin vortex of dissipation. It was too late this winter for the public balls, at which mysterious women who have lost caste masquerade in silken dominoes. But to compensate for this there were the variety theatres of lax observance, where the latest and spiciest obscenities from the Parisian boulevards were diluted and dished up and offered to hungry pleasure-lovers as highly stimulating to the appetite. There were the night cafes, where pruriency was draped in literary tags, and flighty women escaped from the restraints of middle-class respectability, competed with the professional music-hall stars for the palm of vulgarity. They frequented bars and grill-rooms and back parlours of fashionable restaurants to which the police forbade lock and key, and where, under the scornfully smiling eyes of correct waiters, dull orgies were held. Lastly came those brilliantly lighted cafes, dense with blue cigarette-smoke, where jaded nerves seek a final pick-me-up in association with prostitution as it parades its wares for sale in the market-place and on the house-tops. For some time Lilly protested against these distractions; for her senses still aspired to a different and higher kind of enjoyment. She cherished, too, vague feelings of regret that this life of dissipation was drawing her further and further away from those laurel flanked stairs, the goal of her secret longing. But when she saw that every wish she expressed for quiet was met with sullen opposition, she slowly abandoned the idea, and relegated all her dreams of better things to a distant future, when she might look forward to a possibility of their being fulfilled. She dared not let her imagination stray further. Besides, how amusing and fascinating nearly always was this new life! She had every reason to be content with it. They were not often alone together. There were acquaintances wherever they went. They constantly met Kellermann's carnival guests again. They would fall in with one another informally or make appointments beforehand. They formed a little set of themselves, to which new-comers were always hanging on.