Most distressing of all was his clientele. The artistic ideals of the metropolis in a measure made a moral demand upon him to go over to the secession and place on the market long-necked, narrow-hipped bodies in distorted attitudes. The real public, however, the well-intentioned public with purchasing power, would have nothing to do with all that rubbish. It clung to knights and high-born dames, to maidens plucking flowers or carrying water, to fighting stags and swinging monkeys. So he stood between the devil and the deep sea. On the one hand was the danger that people would ridicule him as old-fashioned, on the other hand, the danger of losing most of his old hereditary customers. So he had to steer carefully along a middle course, and that was extremely difficult. He also spoke frequently of the factory, with its hundreds of industrious hands, who laboured day after day for the prosperity of the house; and of the alterations being made in his yard and sample room, which, to judge by the architect's plans and the sum he calculated they would cost, would produce something worth seeing. But what doesn't competition force a man to do? Lilly listened with shining eyes. She shared in all his activities. She wanted to see everything and experience it with him, not only the renovation of the sample room, but also the doings in the factory with its machines, its clatter of wheels, its hissing of flames, and screeching of files. She never wearied of questioning. She had to know how the workmen looked and behaved, their wages, their lot in life, and what became of them. She felt that there in his factory was real existence, while her life was nothing but a dull, idle waking dream. "Oh, how happy you must be," she often cried out admiringly, "to have so many souls in your keeping!" "If the whole bunch of them didn't keep you in a stew all the time," he rejoined. But she would not admit the qualification. He was certainly a beneficent god to them all, she said, even if he did not feel it himself. He must be, because of his power and his good heart. Mr. Dehnicke gladly listened to such expressions. While she was speaking he would jump up abruptly, as if seized by a mighty, revolutionary idea, pace up and down the room excitedly, then stop in front of her and stare down at her with a dark solicitous look in his eyes, apparently unable to reach some great decision against which he was struggling. Lilly pretended not to notice his behaviour, though she knew exactly what was fermenting in his soul. "Let him alone, don't help him," she thought. "He must do whatever he wants to do of his own impulse. Otherwise he will bear me a grudge." If only there hadn't been that hateful sense of duty toward Walter, which, like herself, Mr. Dehnicke probably felt only in part, and shammed as a matter of decorum. There was something else that gave her qualms. Although he had promised to, he had never fulfilled the wish she had expressed to see his factory.