Before starting for the West Prussian asylum to attend the funeral, her chief anxiety had been to get as simple mourning as possible, for she was ashamed not to have done more for her mother, and did not wish to give cause for scandal by being too elegant as she stood at the pauper grave. All the same, the officials and doctors at the asylum were most deferential to her, and appeared to regard her as some exquisite black bird of Paradise. It was not till after she had spent three very hot spring evenings, praying and meditating, beside the small heap of gravel, that she returned to Berlin, full of serious thoughts and re-awakened memories. While away she had thought she hated Richard, but when she found him waiting for her at the station, she sank into his arms helplessly, craving for his sympathy. For now she had no one else but him; he really was her all on earth. It was an understood thing that for the next few months nocturnal dissipations should cease on account of her mourning, and to his credit Richard showed her every consideration in the matter. He sat at home spending many quiet evenings with her, reading books that he couldn't appreciate and playing backgammon; and would go to sleep on the sofa rather than attempt to beguile her into the gay world. But in order that he should not be quite lost to that world, it was agreed that he should have every other evening to himself. The notoriety that his beautiful mistress had acquired smoothed the way for him. He was elected to the Club that he had long hankered after, through the support of two of her aristocratic admirers, without a single blackball. So now it was open to him to enjoy the supreme felicity of losing part of his firm's hardly earned fortune to young scions of the nobility, foreign attaches, and other superior beings. Lilly was not pleased to hear of his losses, which he confided to her with much feigned growling and grumbling. She practised economy more assiduously than before to try and make them good. He laughed at her efforts, and declared that she cost him no more than an extra cigarette a day; but her conviction that she was a burden on the firm of Liebert & Dehnicke remained deeply rooted. On the quiet evenings that he recruited from his nights of dissipation their business conversations were resumed. Lilly liked to "talk shop," and she displayed a keen commercial as well as artistic faculty.