Frau Jula gave an exclamation of delight. "Oh, how charming you have made it all--so dear and cosy! I do believe I am right in saying that you were born to be a married housewife. You should see my rubbishy place! But what is the good of keeping up appearances when my red-headed boy ruins his digestion at restaurants, dining on lamb kidneys _au lard_ and truffles? When he is at home I make him gruel and bread-crumbs, and give it to him straight out of the saucepan, without any ceremony or laying of table." "Thank goodness," Lilly thought, "she is her natural self again." The meal was quite unpretentious, consisting of cold meat dishes and baked potatoes, with the remains of a tart for sweet. But Frau Jula ate with a greater relish than she had known for years, and commented on everything. Lilly told her that for the sake of economy she ordered her meat from the country. She would gladly give her friend the address. "I guessed you did that," said Frau Jula, with a soft sigh, her eyes meditatively fixed on space.... And after a pause came the confession in a low voice. "It was the same there." "Where?" asked Lilly. "At home, where we lived." Then suddenly she hurled away her napkin, jumped up, and went to the open window. She wrung her hands, beat her forehead, and called hysterically into the evening air: "I am going to the bad as fast as I can--utterly to the bad!" "What is the matter with you?" Lilly stammered. She was so shocked that she too sprang up and went to the window. "I want to go back to my husband ... to my husband.... My husband is a monster, a beast, it's true. Life there is simply death ... that's all perfectly true. Yet I want to go back to my husband.... Here I shall go under--under." Lilly laid her hand caressingly on her neck. "Why, dear," she said consolingly, "you have just been giving me such useful instructions as to how to avoid going under. And, then, you have in your literary art a mainstay, which I lost long ago." Sighing, she glanced at the curtained cupboards, where the last of her pasted sunset forests glowed in obscurity. "No, no; you will not go under. You will rise higher and higher, to the very top, and from there look down on other poor women." Frau Jula sobbed on her shoulder. "Never now, never!" she cried. "I can't get out of this whirlpool. It's poisoned me; my brain is poisoned. I am going to the bad! I am going to the bad!" Lilly put her arm gently in hers and led her back to the sofa-corner in the unlighted drawing-room, where she had been sitting before. "Ah, here it is nice and dark," she said, whimpering like a child. "Here I can tell you everything, but shut the door; there mustn't be a gleam of light." Lilly closed the door of the "pattern" room. Now they were sitting in the dark. Only the late evening twilight, which from the canal penetrated the still scanty branches of the chestnuts, cast a greyish shadow on her tear-stained face.